


Probable Cause

by manic_intent



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: M/M, NOTE: MOST OF THIS FIC IS T-RATED, That pre-film fic where Peter meets Saal for the first time, and he tries to get Saal's help for a thing that is possibly maybe a tiny bit illegal, one can always hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-13
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-17 04:58:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 45,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2297399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life in the Nova Corps meant odd hours and often random meal times, but this suited Garthan, most days. It meant that Errin's stall was quiet whenever he swung by, save for the odd tourist or two, and Errin knew better than to try small talk on an off-hours Corpsman trying to have a good meal in a bit of peace before going back on the beat. </p><p>Today, Garthan made it midway through the bowl before his perfect daily moment of peace was ruined by a tourist. Off-worlders were common on Xandar: the planet was an interstellar trading hub, after all, with free trade agreements signed with most intergalactic civs, but years in the Corps had given Garthan a healthy understanding of trouble, and this tourist positively <i>reeked</i> of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> bb!Chris Pratt:  
> 
> 
> Note: I'm not entirely sure whether Garthan's name is 'Garthan' or 'Garthaan', but Marvel wiki puts it at 'Garthan', so I'm going with that for now...
> 
> EDIT: Garthan Saal is this character: (I can't find a pic of him not looking exasperated)  
> 

I.

Nova Millennian Garthan Saal was not a Xandarian often moved by sentiment, but the burnished sense of warm avarice that he felt whenever a bowl of Errin Vaaestro's famous fletchern stew was pushed over the counter towards him was _probably_ what love was meant to feel like.

Garthan had a ritual for this. First the reverent rubbing of thumbs along the rim of the cheap pastewood bowl. Then the small sniff, taking in the rich, oil-and-aashan aroma, spicy enough to make his mouth water. The first dip of a spoon, taking in just a taste of the thick drennfish broth. Then a dip of the crusty, reconstituted yeast bread.

Life in the Nova Corps meant odd hours and often random meal times, but this suited Garthan, most days. It meant that Errin's stall was quiet whenever he swung by, save for the odd tourist or two, and Errin knew better than to try small talk on an off-hours Corpsman trying to have a good meal in a bit of peace before going back on the beat. 

Today, Garthan made it midway through the bowl before his perfect daily moment of peace was ruined by a tourist. Offworlders were common on Xandar: the planet was an interstellar trading hub, after all, with free trade agreements signed with most intergalactic civs, but years in the Corps had given Garthan a healthy understanding of trouble, and this tourist positively _reeked_ of it. 

Young. Seemingly Xandarian, but probably not: there were tells that any Xandarian could recognise - the clothes, for one, clearly some sort of offworlder style, the hair, the unfamiliar config of the blaster stock visible from the holster at the stranger's hip. Not Asgardian, not with those clothes, not with the subtle imperfections in the skin and poise. Valar? 

"Hey," the offworlder drawled, and Garthan's allspeak implant hesitated a fraction of a second longer than it should have. 

_Now_ the offworlder had Garthan's full attention. The Nova Corps were equipped with the best allspeak implants that Asgard could make, certified seamless with all intergalactic dialects from Xandar to Knowhere and a hell of a lot of obscure krutack in between, including the chittering vowelless speech that passed for language among the Brood. For the implant to skip like that before a translation meant that the offworlder either hailed from rim space, or-

"You're an Earther," Garthan deduced, and the offworlder's eyebrows jump.

"Wow. Good guess." The Earther grinned, apparently genuinely pleased. "You Corpsmen have got to be regular Sherlock Holmeses."

"Who?"

"Nevermind." The Earther swiped one hand back and forth, in a dismissive signing gesture, common to offworlders who didn't spend a lot of time down a gravity well: facial expressions tended to cede the field to gestures for people who were just at home in full g as they were in an environment suit. 

A spacer, then, but one who had grown at least part of his life in down a gravity well: he didn't have the elongated bone structure that a life in low g would have given him. Young, with curly, dirty blonde hair that had obviously been hacked short with a knife, a handsome boy verging on becoming an adult, gangly and tall, in a rumpled white tunic and prefabbed dust-gray breeches. Nothing fancy: however the Earther had managed to get offworld, he was probably working haulers or freight. 

"What do you want?" Garthan settled for asking brusquely. His bowl was getting cold, and he was still technically off-duty. "If you have an official matter to report, the closest Nova Precinct is half a klick south, past the skannar tracks."

"Hasn't anyone just come over to say hello before?" the Earther seemed amused again. "Or is that against your Corpsman rulebook?"

That was such a patently ridiculous question that Garthan tried a withering glare, but the Earther's grin merely widened, and he extended a hand over, palm held perpendicular to the table. "The name's Star-Lord." 

The Earther waited, as though expecting some sort of response. Some sort of minor celebrity, perhaps? Garthan wasn't usually one to follow the gossip tabs. He raised an eyebrow. After an awkward pause, he prompts, "And...?"

'Star-Lord' deflated visibly. "But you can call me Peter."

Garthan stared at the outstretched hand warily, and Peter dropped it back to his side after an awkward moment. " _And_?"

"And what?"

"And do you have an official matter to report?"

"No! No." Peter hesitated, looking a little lost, then he start to grin again, slow and mischievous, as though he'd finally seen the punchline of a convoluted joke. "Oh man. You haven't been hit on before, have you?" 

Again the allspeak implant hesitated. It wasn't always great with slang. Furrowing his brow, Garthan said slowly, "Violence is an occupational hazard."

"I didn't mean that! I meant," Peter hesitated, opened his mouth, then hesitated some more, then he shrugged. "You're kinda really good looking, Corpsman," Peter said, and grinned his mischievous, irritating grin. "Can I buy you a drink?"

Oh. 

Garthan's stare now was probably part puzzlement, part disbelief: whatever it was, Peter seemed to find it hilarious - he started to chuckle, eyes crinkling in mirth, and Garthan's best scowl didn't seem to put a damper in the Earther's mood: chuckles turned into hearty, gasping laughter. Annoyed, Garthan took in a deep breath, then another, and pointedly turned back to his stew. Unfortunately, Nova Prime had a zero-tolerance policy about using the Nova Force against the merely irritating. 

By the time Garthan finished his stew, Peter had thankfully grown bored of his laughable attempts at flirtation and had slunk out of the stall, much to Errin's and Garthan's relief. Garthan paid up, and then the day promptly went to hell, what with an all-out brawl in subsector 5/c and three homicide vics found in a recycling plant by the janitor. 

The triple vics, thankfully, belonged to one of the local scumbag crime outfits, and had been on the suspect list for a string of felonies running from extortion to burglary to trafficking, and as such less paperwork was involved, but they still got a place up on the board, if only because the possibility of a local gang war was bad news for everyone. 

He stumbled home late, bleary and profoundly disillusioned about civilisation in general, which was not a particularly unusual end-of-the-day Corpsman sentiment, and while dragging himself over to the aerosonic cleanser, nearly walked right into Peter.

They stared at each other for a long moment: Garthan with utterly blank astonishment, Peter with grin that started to falter when a minute dragged by in silence, then Garthan asked, very precisely, very slowly, "Did you break into my apartment?"

"Xandarian security locks aren't the greatest," Peter admitted, and then has the grace to look slightly embarrassed when Garthan shot him a level stare. 

" _Why_ did you break in?"

"We're establishing action and intent here?" Peter tried another grin, but Garthan merely rubbed a palm slowly over his face. 

"I'm too tired to deal with you, Earther. Get out." 

"Aww, don't be like that. When was the last time you had any fun?" 

"If you haven't left the apartment by the time I'm done with the cleanser," Garthan said flatly, "I'm going to arrest you for trespass. Out." 

Peter put up his hands in a placating gesture. "All right. All right. I'm getting out." He started to back towards the entrance, but then Garthan's tired brain finally caught up to the rest of him, and he shot another slower, longer look at the kid. Peter's left hand was fine, but his right was wavering slightly, a nervous tremor, his wrists and elbows held stiffly up.

Frowning, Garthan strode back over, ignoring Peter's flinch as he grabbed his right wrist, shoving up the tunic sleeve. A field dressing - one of Garthan's, by the look of it - had been applied rather haphazardly high up on Peter's arm, and it was fresh. Glancing back over his shoulder, Garthan noted, again belatedly, that his field kit was out over the narrow dining table, as well as the bottle of kaardas burn gel. 

"Blaster fire?" Garthan asked dryly. Low-amp, not meant to be fatal, but enough to be severely uncomfortable, by the looks of it. 

Peter's playfulness was gone: he nodded warily, still and tense like an animal, and Garthan rejected his original hypothesis of Peter being part of some freighter crew. There were really only one breed of spacer that liked risk, was familiar with blaster fire field treatment, and liked outlandish nicknames.

"You're a pirate." 

"I kinda prefer the term 'independent contractor'," Peter countered quickly.

"Why in the Worldmind's name would you even approach me?"

"Eh," Peter grinned, blatantly looking Garthan up and down, but he sobered at Garthan's narrowing eyes. "Uh. The people looking for me wouldn't be looking too closely at anyone talking to a Corpsman, let alone a Millennian. And they wouldn't check for me in a Corpsman's home. Which would also usually have a med kit. Sorry about the kit. I was going to clean up." 

"What people looking for you?"

"My boss kinda failed to mention that he once ticked off the Razorbacks when he sent me to settle up an account with them. Or maybe he failed to mention it on purpose." Peter shrugged. "He's a deep end of the pool sort of guy. They had long memories."

Razorbacks. Garthan closed his eyes briefly, tamping down on his instinctive exasperation, chasing the ping of recognition that the Corpsman part of his brain had supplied. "Did you shoot three persons in a recycling plant?"

" _They_ shot at me first," Peter protested, then hesitated, and bit down on his lower lip. 

Worldmind, but the Earther was younger than Garthan had thought. Seventeen cycles old, perhaps. Maybe older, but not by much. He couldn't really tell, not with Earthers: all he knew about that species were a few Asgardian docovids that he'd seen in passing on the public holovids when on the beat. 

Maybe he was tired, or maybe because Garthan couldn't quite stand sloppy jobs: he found himself marching Peter back to the dining table and pushing him back on the chair, then rewrapping the field dressing more neatly. He put two meal cards in the replicator, used the cleanser, changed in his small bedchamber to civvies and returned to the kitchen, in time to see Peter rather sheepishly and meekly setting out cutlery. 

"You're nicer than you look," Peter suggested, when Garthan deposited a bowl of reconstituted faux-heergal stew and ritt grains in front of the kid.

"You're a probable suspect in a case," Garthan retorted, sitting down to eat, then had to add, "Slow down, or you'll choke yourself." 

Peter paused in the middle of shovelling spoonfuls of grain into his mouth, grinning again, a genuine grin this time: it lit up his eyes, and Worldmind, but Earthers had _beautiful_ eyes: pale green, vibrant with humour. Garthan found himself staring at a bowl for the second time in Peter's company, eating mechanically and forcing himself to take slow, even breaths. 

"So I'm not under arrest?" Peter asked, when he ends up helping Garthan to stack the bowls and cutlery into the washer. 

"Depends."

"Depends on?"

"On whether you're still here when I wake up," Garthan said. Peter's face visibly fell, and a nudge of uncharacteristic guilt pressed at Garthan's battered conscience. Irritably, he added, "But you can sleep on the divan. Just make sure that you're gone in the morning. Understand?"

"On the divan?"

"Or you can sleep on the floor for all I care."

"I meant, really the divan?" Peter grinned again, slyly this time, pressing a hand over Garthan's wrist, and for a moment his heart rate picked up, to Garthan's total puzzlement. Sure, Peter was pretty, but he was an _offworlder_. A pirate. And he had just killed three Razorback bruisers with nothing to show for it other than minor blaster nerve damage. Even if Garthan hadn't had the benefit of years of experience in law enforcement, he would've known that the kid was trouble.

Still. Rational or not, Garthan felt a hot anticipatory tension coil up within him, but he took a breath, gritted his teeth and set his jaw. "Divan or floor. Or get out now and take your chances. The Razorbacks are doing a level by level sweep of the subfloors, anywhere that they think a shooter might be hiding out. Which is why you broke in here, as you said." 

"Okay, okay. Geez." Peter took a step back, his hands raised in another placating gesture. "Message received, loud and clear."

"Good."

"Just..." Peter hesitated, then he nibbled on his lower lip again. "Um. Thank you. Officer." 

Young. Beautiful. Completely inappropriate. Gruffly, Garthan muttered, "Stay out of trouble, boy," and dragged himself off to his bedchamber.

II.

Peter was gone in the morning, which was a bit of a relief and a bit of a disappointment. Garthan had a quick mealcard breakfast, his first cup of black for the day, then it was off to the precinct, nerves starting to buzz from the stims. On the board, the names of the three vics winked accusingly at him from where they had been pushed into the third-tier column, but he ignored them as he headed over to his desk. An offworlder shooting some Razorback boys wasn't exactly something high on the Nova Corps' scale of attention, not when they had three planets and a couple of asteroid stations to police.

An Earther. By the Worldmind.

Midway through filing his morning paperwork, Garthan found himself pinging port control for any records of an Earther arrival. Unsurprisingly, there weren't any: there wasn't even a category for 'Earther' in the port records database: but then Earthers looked physiologically like Xandarians to the untrained observer, and Garthan didn't think that the kid would advertise his species. A few checks of the docking manifests over the past few days didn't throw up any red flags, but that wasn't unusual either. Xandar was a free port, and a busy one. For all that it was also the homeworld of the Nova Corps, port controls tended to be purposefully forgiving, in the name of free trade and profits. 

This was ridiculous. Garthan had real work to do, and he was wasting his time chasing up a curiosity. He tried to tell himself that it was because it was a mystery, and he hated mysteries, but it didn't feel convincing, especially when he opened up the Nova Corps file on the Razorbacks to look through any past citations of Razorback-offworlder conflicts. 

There was one. Three cycles back, a neat file by the forensics team: a gang deal gone sour, by the looks of it. The offworlder presence hadn't been confirmed: only that security feeds had shown that the Razorbacks had been killed by a single perp, in a coat, with a strange weapon that nobody had ever seen: slender, thin, and sound-controlled, somehow. A yaka arrow. 

Which meant, in the duty officer's opinion, that the perp was, in all likelihood, Yondu Udonta of the infamous Ravagers. 

A pirate king. 

The damned kid was a _Ravager_. 

With a sigh, Garthan brought up the triple vic file, stared at it for a long moment, and hesitated again. He could put out an APB for the kid, get Peter called in for questioning. Putting out an APB with Peter's description would slot him neatly into the general face-rec system. Lots of bounty hunters freelanced out of Xandar, due to its relaxed taxation laws. Peter would probably be found in a heartbeat. 

But he might not end up being sent to a Nova Corps precinct for processing. The Razorbacks kept their ear to the ground - all the criminal outfits had to, to stay sufficiently off radar in Corps-heavy Xandar. An APB could quite possibly mean Peter's death. 

Peter was a Ravager.

Young. Beautiful. Dangerous. Possibly not dangerous enough. 

Garthan frowned at a screen for a moment longer, then he scowled and closed the file. 

Lunch was a sparan wrap, recently popular in Xandar due to the influx of Kree refugees and most probably reconstituted, but life in the Nova Corps had long inured Garthan's taste buds to disappointment, and it was all he could get in between cases, catching downtime outdoors in one of the open parks, sitting beside a fountain. Watching the crowd, because he was technically still on duty. He got partway through the bland wrap with his brain on autopilot, and as such actually flinched when Peter said, softly, "Hey." 

He hadn't seen the kid sneak up to him, and Garthan covered his surprise and annoyance with a gruff, "Still here?"

Peter shrugged, sitting down next to him. He looked a little worn, and Garthan had started off his Nova Corpsman career in Vice. He knew what that pinched look meant. Wordlessly, he passed the wrap over to Peter, who looked surprised for a moment, then awkward, then a little guilty as hunger took over. 

"Have you been following me?" Garthan asked, when the wrap was history and Peter was wiping crumbs off his lap.

"Not really. Okay. Maybe."

Despite himself, Garthan was a little impressed. He hadn't noticed being tailed. Nor had his link to the Nova Force picked up anything untoward. "Why?"

"I was thinking," Peter began, paused, then blurted out in a rush, "Maybe we could help each other."

"Kid," Garthan said dryly, "You owe me for two meals and boarding so far."

"Yeah. And I can pay that back," Peter offered a winning grin, but when Garthan kept his expression neutral, he wilted a little. "Okay. Right. I didn't mean that. I meant, maybe you can help me with my business, and I'll help you score a bust. It'll be one for the books, too. Maybe it'll get you a promotion."

"Do you know how promotion works in the Nova Corps?" Garthan asked. 

"Uh-"

"Everyone in the Nova Corps has a link to the Nova Force. Produced by the Worldmind. The better the link, the higher the rank. We get assessed when we apply to join the Nova Corps. If we're successful, the Worldmind decides our access to the Nova Force. The stronger the link, the higher the rank." 

"... That's weird," Peter blinked. "What if a total idiot gets named into high command?"

"It's happened before. But rarely. The Xandarian Worldmind is a good judge of character."

"Then what's the point of working hard?" Peter asked earnestly. "If you're gonna be pulling the same salary forever?"

"It's an honour to be named to the Nova Corps," Garthan said stiffly. "Regardless of rank."

"The Worldmind, it's a living computer, isn't it?" Peter looked thoughtful. "Don't computers sometimes reassess stuff?"

"It does. But it's rare."

"Do you know why you were stuck being a Millennian?" Peter pointed at the bar of rank set over Garthan's chestplate. 

"No. And there's nothing wrong with being a Millennian," Garthan scowled. "I'm happy with my position."

"... okay." Peter chewed on his lower lip for a moment, and Garthan averted his eyes, taking in a slow breath and clenching his hands. This was ridiculous. He really should be getting back to work- "Maybe no promotion. But you could still get brownie points for this bust. I'm serious." 

"If you have a crime to report, there's always the duty Corpsman at the precinct."

"God, you're such a hardass," Peter grumbled. "I need your help, okay? Please. Pretty please."

"Why would I help a Ravager?"

Garthan had been watching Peter carefully through his peripheral vision, and to his credit, although Peter tensed up instantly, he didn't deny it. "Wow. You're good."

"Flattery won't get you anywhere." 

"I mean, what tripped me up? I'm not in the gear. I'm not using their weaps, and I took two transits to get here on civvie freight." 

"The Ravagers have twenty-five outstanding felony warrants against them in Xandarian space. Thirteen of them writ against Yondu Udonta himself. We have an extensive file," Garthan said, a little evasively, but Peter didn't seem to notice.

"Yeah, he's a charming guy, isn't he?" Peter noted, and exhaled. "That's why they sent in the newbie."

"To negotiate with the Razorbacks."

"That's the one."

"Yondu wants you dead, boy."

"Easier ways to do that if it was the case," Peter countered, and that was true. Yondu wasn't renowned for convoluted solutions. If he had wanted one of his own dead, he would simply have chucked the vic out of the nearest airlock.

"Then what is it?"

"What is what?"

"Why are you _here_ ," Garthan grit out, "Begging a Corpsman for help against the Razorbacks?"

Peter picked a little nervously at his sleeve. "We've all got to prove ourselves if we want a ship." 

Garthan snorted. "Yondu is ruthless, but he's not vicious. If he set impossible tasks for any Ravager who wanted to get his own M-class, he'll have half the fleet that he does now."

"Got to prove ourselves if we want a ship _early_ ," Peter clarified, and grinned, young and reckless and beautiful, and... fine, Garthan could believe that. It didn't feel like the entirety of the truth of it, but that was a matter for another time, perhaps. 

"So why would I help a Ravager?" 

"Because if you don't, I'll probably end up dead?"

"You knew the risks when you took up this ridiculous venture to impress Yondu." 

"Okay, okay," Peter held up his hands, again in that placating gesture. No tremor to his right hand now, though. "This bust I was talking about? It's a kraka manufacturing lab." At Garthan's blank look, Peter snorted. "You guys don't know about kraka? Man, it's famous out over in the free zones. It's the only thing that ever came close to being outlawed in _Knowhere_. Look it up."

"And what sort of 'help' do you need from me?"

"Well, I was thinking," Peter tried another grin, "When you guys run the bust, it'll probably be noise and chaos everywhere, right? Maybe I could nip in behind the Nova Corps and remove a small item from a side room. Then I can head offworld, you'll be covered in glory, or whatever it is that passes as career advancement in Xandar, and we'll be even." 

"Or," Garthan pointed out, "I could haul you over to the port and get you deported to Vegat. You could hail the Ravagers from there." 

"Or you could look up kraka, and call me back," Peter countered. "I'll ping you my number. It won't hurt. Just think about it for a few hours. Then if you really don't want to help me, I'll head over to the port myself. Deal?"

"I don't make deals with 'independent contractors'," Garthan noted, and checked his wristfeed. "You have three hours to get offworld."

"Nope, I'm a totally legit tourist right now," Peter grinned. "You can't make me."

"You've also committed three felony murders."

"Self-defence. Also, you can't prove it."

That was true. "I'll look up the term," Garthan gave up, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "But you're coming with me to the precinct."

"What? _Why_?"

"So that I can keep an eye on you. Think of it as extending me an expression of good will." Garthan allowed himself a thin, sharp smile. 

"You're _such_ a hardass," Peter muttered. "Fine."


	2. Chapter 2

I.

Garthan had been hoping that visiting the precinct would shake up the kid, make it incontrovertibly obvious that his current line of approach - his current line of _work_ , even - was far too much trouble for its worth. He was disappointed here too. Peter tensed up when they stepped into the Nova Core Precinct, passing by briskly walking Corpsmen of various ranks on their business, but he relaxed quickly enough, keeping close to Garthan but not too obviously so. Ready to melt into the background, even here.

Someone had trained the kid well. Garthan had a depressing feeling that it was the notorious Yondu Udonta himself. Zatoans were rare in this sector of space, but three years back, Yondu had somehow managed to slip through port security, kill a handful of Razorbacks, and slip out, all without getting positively ID'd. If he hadn't used the yaka arrow, he probably would never have been ID'd at all. 

"How come you don't have a partner?" Peter asked, as they headed towards the jaunt lifts, past the huge, bustling processing foyer. 

This was the perp floor, but Peter showed no sign of being intimidated, not even when a brace of Corpsmen firmly marched a shackled handful of bloodied Kree past. Knife wounds and the shakes. Standard night out in the illegal blood rings out in sublevel 10. 

"Getting married isn't a requirement for becoming a Corpsman," Garthan replied absently, nodding at a fellow Millennian. 

"I meant," Peter frowned, "I meant like a colleague. A partner Corpsman. You know? Like a two-man team?"

Garthan shot Peter a puzzled look. "Whatever for?" 

"Uh, I don't know? Someone to watch your back?" Peter looked genuinely confused.

"Kid, I'm linked to the Nova Force. The Worldmind itself is 'watching my back'," Garthan said dryly. "And everyone else here. If I were to get hurt, every Corpsman would know. They'll zero in on my location immediately. If I need backup, the Worldmind will assess the situation ahead of time and send it. It's telepathically tapped into everyone in the Nova Corps, all the time. The Nova Force is a two-way street." 

"Oh." Peter was silent, up until they got into one of the pod-shaped jaunt lifts. "It's different on my homeworld," he said softly, and for a moment he looked so uncharacteristically lost that Garthan felt himself softening a little. 

Just a little.

"Why did you leave?"

"Didn't exactly have a choice," Peter shrugged, but when Garthan started to frown, he added, "But I'm happy with my life. I mean, I can't imagine living on Earth. It's a _pre-spacer_ civ. If I had to go back, I'd probably go stir crazy in a _month_. I'm glad to be out here."

"Happy running suicidal errands for Yondu?"

Peter grinned boyishly, as though Garthan had made a joke. "Always a little give and take somewhere." 

"You think that being a Ravager is fun?" Garthan retorted. "It'll catch up with you someday, boy. Maybe not here, or now, but it will. Yondu's the king of thieves and smugglers. That's not a life that usually has a kind ending." 

Instead of snapping back a retort, or a joke, Peter merely stared at him appraisingly, then he grinned as the lift hissed to a stop. "You ever been out there? In space?"

"Sure," Garthan said neutrally. "Every Corpsman does their time in transference. Rotating between the Core precincts," he clarified, when Peter looked blank. 

"And when you were... transferring, you never thought about how fun it would be to just... jet off? Explore? There's got to be a way over a billion worlds out there." 

"Most of space is empty nothingness." 

"My mom once told me that there were two types of people," Peter said then, with another appraising look. "Most people grow up to love the campfire. They fear the dark and the howling wolf." 

Allspeak gave up on 'wolf', but Garthan could guess at the meaning. "And the rest?"

"They envy it," Peter shrugged, and there was a wildness to his grin this time, along with the playfulness. "It is how it is." 

And there it was, Garthan saw, the reason why Peter had embarked on this insane crusade, with no apparent resources but a probably stolen blaster and his own wit. To leave the campfire and follow the wolf, out in the vastness of space, you needed a ship. 

"You could work freight or haulers," he found himself saying anyway. "Smart kid like you would rise fast. Eventually even reach the captaincy."

"And I'll be taking trade jobs or haulage, just doing taxi trips between ports," Peter countered. "I'll be worrying my ass off about crew pay, and bills of lading, and port taxes and contracts. That don't sound like the wolf to me, Officer. That's the campfire. It just moves a little now and then, that's all."

Garthan gave up as they walked out from the jaunt corridors into the main, crowded floor of the homicide division. He wasn't exactly the nurturing type, and the kid was old enough and smart enough to make his own decisions, even patently bad ones. "In here." He let the kid into one of the interrogation rooms. "Wait for me there. If 'kraka' checks out as something interesting, we'll talk further." 

"Do I have to?" Peter protested, goggling at the vast expanse of operators, cubicles, and wall offices, the huge overhead holoscreen boards with their ever-changing tiered ranks of open investigations, the raw noise of people making and taking calls, of holding meetings, of marching in suspects, witnesses, experts, legal staff, more. "I could sit by your desk. I'll be quiet."

"Do you want me to help you or not?" Garthan retorted, and Peter sighed, raised his palms again, and stepped into the interrogation room, slouching into one of the chairs and giving Garthan a thumbs-up sign when Garthan didn't charge up the stasis door to trap him inside. The kid was still, as he put it, a legitimate tourist. Unfortunately. 

Garthan didn't start off doing the search immediately - he had files to process and pings to answer, and absorbed in his work, several cubicles down, he only noticed that someone else had approached the interrogation room when he leaned over to nod back at a greeting from a passing Millennial. 

It was Denarian Rhomann Dey. Portly, newly married, and two years into his rank, he was one of the few Denarians willingly assigned to Public Order, the division that handled street patrols. Some saw it as a lack of ambition. Garthan knew better. Dey was a Xandarian with a soft spot for strays: animals and children and the destitute, and he had zeroed in correctly on Peter as belonging to one of the three categories. Possibly all three.

Garthan hesitated, then he thumbed in the room's voice feed to the ops implant in his ear. 

"... in trouble again, Star Prince?"

"It's 'Star-Lord', Rhomann," Peter said unenthusiastically. "Does it look like I'm in trouble? The door's open. I'm just waiting on a friend, that's all."

Garthan grimaced, turning to look at the holovid feed at his desk, but thankfully, Dey jumped to the wrong conclusion. "Kids your age shouldn't be making trouble. Those kinds of decisions will follow you around. This is the homicide floor. Is your friend in _that_ much trouble? Who is it? Maybe I can help."

"He's not a perp, he's just in for questioning," Peter said glibly, which was a smart thing to say: Homicide was one of the largest Core divisions, with over thirty interrogation rooms in the precinct. "Don't worry. I'll be offworld soon. Got a haulage gig, like you suggested." 

"Congratulations," Dey said, with evident relief. "That's the spirit. Don't vandalise anymore walls, keep your nose clean, and you'll go far." 

"I've learned my lesson," Peter assured him, with a faint slyness in his tone. The kid was too clever by half. The Denarian walked off, at least, probably heading back to processing, and Garthan relaxed.

"Hey," Peter said suddenly, and instinctively, Garthan glanced over in his direction, in time to see an impish grin, and a wink. "Knew you were listening in." 

Garthan rolled his eyes, switched the feed off, and grumpily ran the check. No use stalling any further, and he had a suspicion that a long-term acquaintance with Peter was probably going to be bad for his blood pressure. 

The moment he sent the query through, however, his screen locked, going to the screensaver. Garthan frowned, making an impatient swipe, but the holovid was unresponsive. "What in the-"

"Millennian Garthan Saal," the disembodied, sexless voice of the Worldmind murmured into his ear. "Report to Kernel now." There was a pause, then, "And bring your visitor with you."

II.

Garthan was too keyed up to speak as they got into the jaunt lifts. He didn't need to palm in a floor this time - the Worldmind had taken control of the lift, neat as anything, and it was starting its downward rush.

Kernel. Garthan had been to Kernel only once in his entire career in the Nova Corps, and that was to get assessed. As far as he knew, only Nova Prime and possibly the Centurions were the only people in the Corps who had been granted return visits. And further, he'd never heard of any civilians getting granted entry before, save those whom were applying to join the Nova Corps. 

"What happened?" Peter asked, all business now. The kid had a fair nose for trouble. Pity he tended to ignore it. 

"I don't know."

"You don't know? Then where are we going?"

"Kernel," Garthan said flatly, and when Peter tilted his head questioningly, added, "This is a Core Precinct. The heart of any Core Precinct is Kernel."

"So, like your boss' office?"

"In a way."

"What do mean, 'in a way'? Isn't that a 'yes-no' answer?" Peter watched Garthan's face closely. "What's going on, officer Saal?"

"What's kraka?" Garthan countered, his tone tight.

Peter's jaw set, and for a moment, the kid was obviously, visibly tempted to bargain, then his shoulders deflated a little. "Okay. Okay. It's a substance. It's rare out in the free zones. Originated in Knowhere. This is all secondhand knowledge from the crew, all right? Stuff I overheard. Are you in trouble? I'm sorry if you're in trouble. I didn't intend that."

"The crew?"

"The Ravagers. They were talking about it. We saw a kraka outbreak when we were in Knowhere - or rather, they did, I wasn't yet allowed off the ship at that time - and Yondu hustled the whole fleet out of there. Broke a contract. Put Rii and Falsey in quarantine for two weeks, even, until he was sure that they didn't have the symptoms."

"Kraka is a... bioweapon?" Garthan hazarded. 

"Kinda. Not really. It's sort of a drug. A really infectious drug. Anaerobic. Skin contact." 

"What does it do?"

"That's all I know, okay? I was pretty young. Yondu kept me out of it. He didn't like me poking my nose around the serious stuff and getting underfoot." Peter was growing evasive.

Deciding to change track, Garthan asked, "Then how did you know that the Razorbacks have a lab?"

"Uh-uh," Peter narrowed his eyes. "I'm not dumb. I want you to strike a deal with me first." 

Garthan let out an exasperated sigh, but before he could shake Peter a little, the lift pinged open, and Peter stepped out, curious as a puppy. The curiosity turned into puzzlement immediately, and Garthan shook his head slowly, following at a more sedate pace. 

They were standing in an immaculate white room, glowing with a soft light from no discernible output, all around them, all at once, until they cast no shadow. It wasn't an intrusive glare, and to the casual, uninformed observer, it would seem like they were simply in a vast, circular room, empty of furniture or any exit save for the jaunt lift. Garthan walked straight to the centre of the room and folded his hands behind his back, standing at attention, ignoring Peter's inquiring look. 

When the Worldmind spoke, rather to Garthan's surprise, it wasn't to him. "Peter Quill."

The disembodied voice wasn't speaking direct to Garthan's implants, this time, but projected into the room. To the unprepared, it would have sounded as though the person speaking was standing right next to them, and Garthan watched Peter flinch violently to the side and then look around wildly. 

"Be calm," the Worldmind added unemotionally, and Peter looked sharply at Garthan, then back around the room.

"Who am I talking to?" 

"We are many things. We are one thing. We are the Nova Corps. The Nova Corps are we. We are Xandar, we are Ysaros, we are Kryn. We are the Worldmind." 

Peter actually took a nervous step closer to Garthan, then he caught himself, and pushed his thumbs into his belt, forcing a wavering grin that caught and turned cocky. Someone had taught the kid that, too. Situational damage control. "So you're Officer Saal's boss."

"In a sense." 

"He's pretty good, you know. Maybe you should bump his rank up a notch or two."

"We are aware of Millennian Saal's capabilities." The Worldmind said, in its inflectionless voice, even as Garthan shot Peter a pointed glare. "We wish to understand your interest in Millennian Saal."

Garthan took in a slow breath, even as Peter grinned. "I don't know how to make a computer understand this, but he's kinda hot."

The slow breath was let out in an exasperated sigh. There was silence for a moment, then Peter jumped again as a perfect holographic image flickered into existence a foot away. It was a still frame, Peter with his palms up, placating, looking sheepish, and rather to Garthan's surprise, Denarian Dey, standing by, looking stern and confiscating what looked like a squib of paint. Street-issue, sleek and pencil-thin, with a fat nozzle that would vector a sharp line of permanent paint onto almost every flat surface known to Xandar. A vandal's tool.

 _Don't vandalise anymore walls_ , Denarian Dey had said. 

"Twenty-five hours six minutes eight seconds ago," the Worldmind said, and the still frame became animated. 

"Sorry, Officer, I won't do it again," image-Peter said, sounding embarrassed. "It was a dare, like I said. I lost a bet."

"I'm going to let you off this time with a warning," image-Dey said, his tone firm, but kindly all the same. "But I'm going to have to talk to your parents."

Peter's hands clenched slightly, even as image-Peter's expression shut down. "I don't have any parents. But thanks for the warning."

As Garthan thought he would, image-Dey frowned instantly, looking concerned. "Do you have a guardian? A relative?"

"Nope. Can I go now?" 

"You've been living off the street all this time?"

"I make do," image-Peter said evasively. "I'm fine. I'm sorry about the paint, okay?"

Image-Dey wasn't having it, already tracked onto his own personal crusade. "I'll ping you a few numbers. The people there, they can help you. You're old enough to look after yourself, sure. But you're also old enough, maybe, to look a bit further. Kids like you have a lot of energy, I can see that. Maybe you should think of going into freight, or haulage. Put all that energy somewhere." 

"Okay, I'll think about it," Image-Peter said warily, then he cracked a shy, awkward smile that didn't fool Garthan for an instant. "You know, you're not half bad. The way my friends talked about the Nova Corps, I thought I was gonna be arrested and hauled offworld to lockup for sure." 

"Not for this kind of misdemeanour," Image-Dey pinged Peter's wrist set. "There. All set. Stay out of trouble." 

"Or maybe I could join the Nova Corps," Image-Peter said brightly. "Is it a good life?"

"The best there is," Image-Dey said affably, "But to be honest with you, son, the qualification percentage is very, very low. It's best to have a back-up plan. There's nothing wrong with haulage. I've got cousins who do it. They love the life."

"But say I was interested in it," Image-Peter persisted. "Maybe I could talk to someone? One of the lower-ranking officers? Just to get a feel for the life. A great officer."

"Why someone lower-ranking? I could answer your questions if you liked," Image-Dey looked puzzled. "Or the recruitment desk could, back in the Core precinct."

"I guess statistically it's more likely for people to end up in the lower tier ranks, right?" Image-Peter said earnestly. "And it'll be good to get information firsthand. Some honourable guy in Vice. Or Homicide."

"Vice and Homicide?" Image-Dey looked blank for a moment. "Ah. Well. Millennian Garthan Saal is the Xandarian for that. He's worked both departments, over a number of core precincts. One of the very best of his rank."

"Sounds like a great guy," Image-Peter said, even as Garthan levelled a pointed stare at Peter that made the kid duck his head in embarrassment. "Where can I find him?"

"Saal? Saal has the habits of a krjnlat. If he isn't caught up with a case, he'll probably be at Errin's. Or you could probably catch him at home. He won't mind taking a house call for the good of the Corps." Image-Dey rattled off both addresses, even as Garthan stared sourly at the holo of his colleague and superior commanding officer. For someone at Denarian rank and permanently posted to Public Order, Rhomann Dey had a strangely unbreakable conviction of public decency. Peter could have been an _assassin_.

The holographic projections froze back into still images, and Peter cleared his throat, a little red-faced. "Ok, so I did get the details off Denarian Dey. But Officer Saal is still hot." 

"Answer the question, Quill," Garthan said flatly.

"Fine," Peter shifted his weight awkwardly. "I just wanted to suss you out, okay? But you seemed like too much of a hardass to be interested in helping me out on a thing that might have been maybe, a little, kinda teensy bit illegal. So I decided to try and deal with the problem myself. That didn't go so well. Then I broke into your place to patch up. I was going to put everything back when I was done and sneak out of there, then head over to the precinct and maybe talk to Denarian Dey again, but you came home."

Garthan frowned at Peter and didn't speak. In his experience, perps tended to get nervous in silence. It was sentient nature, common to any social species: Xandarian, Asgardian, Kree and more. People liked to fill in the emptiness. As he'd thought, Peter shifted his weight again, and added, "And then you did seem like an all round stand up guy, so I thought, why the hell not? Besides, I wanted to talk to a lower ranking guy in the first place. No offense. I didn't know how your system worked. I thought maybe a lower ranking guy would be more hungry for a bust." 

"How did you know to target Denarian Dey for information?"

"I've been scoping out Xandar for a few days. Keeping an ear out. You learn a lot of things in shelters. Like which cops are soft on kids, and which cops to avoid. I followed the Denarian around for a couple of days. He was nice to tourists, sure. But he was _really_ nice to kids committing small misdemeanours. Felt obliged to 'help' them out, even. Set them right." 

Allspeak was uncertain about 'cops', but Garthan got the gist of it. Seemed like Earther culture and Xandarian culture wasn't too far apart after all, even over the names of their law enforcement. "You could still have asked him for help instead of asking me."

Peter shrugged. "Maybe. As a last resort. But I'm pretty sure that any sympathy I could drum up from Dey would've faded right off the moment he knew what I was really on Xandar for. Besides, he didn't know that I was an offworlder. Neither did the people in the shelters. You're the first one who caught on." 

"What is kraka?"

"I told you, all right?" Peter let out a frustrated hiss. "I know it's something bad, that's all. Bad enough to maybe get a favour out of it." 

"We are aware of the compound known as krakashium," the Worldmind noted, its tone neutral. "It is, as you have said, a contagious drug. Anaerobic. Spreads through skin to skin contact. And invariably fatal over a period of weeks. A total nervous system collapse, for any carbon-based organism."

"People used this drug on Knowhere? Recreationally?" Garthan asked disbelievingly. 

"There's shit that goes down in Knowhere like you can't imagine," Peter said, then he scowled a little. "Or so I've heard. Yondu didn't let me off the ship. Said I was too young."

"How did they contain the spread? In Knowhere?"

Peter shrugged. "I could see that from the ship. They blew off an entire section of that celestial's head. Bigger than this whole precinct. They cauterised it. Kraglin said that things probably got out of control in the lab." 

"The lab was that large?"

"Nope. Apparently they blew it out plus space to spare. Just in case. The two Ravagers who were down in Knowhere on unrelated business nearly didn't make it offworld."

"Why would the Razorbacks make such a thing?" Garthan asked out aloud. "They're a smuggling outfit. Not even in the big leagues, by a long shot."

"Don't know. All I know is that they've got something that belongs to Yondu." Peter set his jaw. "I want to cut a deal. I'll tell you about this lab, and you help me get what I came to Xandar for. _And_ let me get back to Yondu's fleet afterwards, no fuss."

"That's-" Garthan began, but the Worldmind interrupted. "Should your information be pertinent and correct, Peter Quill, we accept." 

Peter visibly relaxed, even as Garthan internalised a sigh. "Okay. Here's how I knew it was kraka. Yondu said it was originally meant to be a stim drug. It was synthesized out of the dead celestial's head. You know, the entire thing that Knowhere is made out of? Some smart guy found a way to get that into a form that people could shoot up their veins." 

"If you've been to Knowhere, you'd never forget it. If only because of the way the place stinks. It's a special sort of stench. Dead celestial brain matter, or whatever. You'll never forget it. Those two Ravagers who came back from Knowhere, their clothes stank of it. And I smelled the same thing when I was down meeting those Razorback guys. One of them smelled like Knowhere." 

"That's all you have?" Garthan didn't even bother to hide his disdain. "Knowhere exports a great deal of organic matter, synthesized or otherwise. It could have been _anything_."

"... all right." Peter exhaled. "There were four Razorback guys. Not three. The fourth guy, he had the symptoms. The early ones. The little shakes in his fingers. The pinkish eyes. The fast talking, like he was tracked up on fast-forward. I didn't even ask about Yondu's thing. I freaked out. Blabbed about kraka. The other three guys, they did a double-take. Started arguing among themselves. I took the opportunity to make a run for it. They ignored me. Started shooting. The infected guy shot two of them before the last guy got him. Then he looked around for me, so I shot him. Though he grazed me a bit." 

"We only found three bodies." 

"And you didn't think about how weird that was? In a recycling _plant_? I could've tossed those three bodies in one of the 'cyclers and you'd never have found out about it. They were a _hint_. I wanted you guys to put a flag on the Razorbacks and start asking around, make them a little nervous." 

"And what happened to the fourth person?"

"I tossed him into one of the big incinerators."

"But the three Razorback bodies remaining could have been infected, and spread that infection to investigating Corpsmen." Garthan hesitated. " _You_ could have been infected!" Worldmind. Garthan _himself_ had visited the crime scene. He felt a little dizzy at the thought. He and all his colleagues had been so close to death.

"Nope. Yondu said the infection vector only works on the living. But I used gloves, all right? 'Sides, it's been a while. No shakes. No pink eyes. I'm good." 

"Why did you bother to burn the fourth body, then?"

" _Because_ ," Peter said, with exaggerated calm, "If you guys found out about the kraka lab _before_ I cut a deal, then I'd have been shit out of luck."

Garthan took in a deep, exasperated breath. It was the Worldmind that ended up speaking. "Thank you for your information, Peter Quill. We will allocate an appropriate Nova Corpsman of Denarian rank to investigate the situation. We trust that you will be cooperative."

"No can do," Peter pointed at Garthan. "I want you to allocate Millennian Saal to this case. I won't work with anyone else." 

"Quill," Garthan snapped, irritated, but Peter grinned at him and stubbornly folded his arms. 

"I don't know anyone else, and I don't think - no offense meant - that this is the kinda job that Denarian Dey would be up for. How'm I to know that the new guy is going to keep his word? He'll be a total stranger." 

There was a pause. "Millennian Garthan Saal. You are to investigate the Razorbacks and the possible existence of the krakashium labs. Your involvement is to remain classified, Clearance Prime. Until the conclusion of this matter, your Force access level is raised to Denarian."

"What-" Garthan began, then he felt it. The stream of infusing force that had wired itself deep into every muscle, every nerve of his body since the first time he had been in this chamber, that had amped his senses, his speed and strength: it was getting richer. More visceral. It was like a staggering rush, a pulse of cold water, a storm-sense that dragged the all-present alien link within him that was the Worldmind larger, like a tide. 

If he had thought his initial induction into the Nova Corps glorious, this was more. This was far better. 

And it was only going to be temporary.

He took a breath, and felt as though he was far away from it all, away from his physical frame; and another breath, forcing himself to realign, to reassess, until, after what felt like an eternity, Garthan rubbed his eyes and straightened up.

"Are you okay?" Peter asked, worried, and Garthan was vaguely aware that Peter had been repeating himself. 

"I'll be fine," Garthan said gruffly. 

"Dismissed," the Worldmind said, and Garthan saluted, then marched briskly towards the jaunt lift, Peter piling in behind him, grinning like an imp.

"See," Peter said, as the lift started back up. "I told you we could help each other." 

For a moment, Garthan felt a burst of red fury, then he found that he had pinned Peter up against the sleek curve of the lift wall, lifting the kid a foot off the ground without even feeling the weight. Peter let out a strangled yelp, flailing for a moment, then he went still, wide-eyed, breathing hard. Garthan held him there for a moment longer, pointedly, then dropped him:. Peter's gravboots made a loud clatter on the ampersteel floor, even as he let out a harsh, startled breath, blinking dumbly up at Garthan's scowl. 

" _Don't_ try to do me any favours again, Quill."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Campfire and the howling wolf - Lee Child reference.


	3. Chapter 3

I.

Once they were out of the lift, Garthan felt a little guilty about the show of force he had used. That had been over the line, especially against a boy. Official brutality. Something had changed in Peter's demeanour: it had gone from playful to watchful, a little tense, and Garthan found that he regretted that. Besides, how was the boy to know? There hadn't been any malice in Peter's actions that Garthan could sense.

The wariness faded when they stepped out into the vast hangar floor of the Core precinct. " _Whoah_!" Peter stared avidly at the gleaming ranks of inert starblasters, their slender fins folded back within chrome cradles, stacked five tiers high stretching almost the length of the entire hangar floor. "Are we going out in one of those?"

Garthan tried not to smile at Peter's excitement. School tours were common through the Xandarian Core precinct, and the hangar bay was one of the most popular destinations. Peter's excitement was nothing new, but it was still contagious. "They're single-seaters."

"How many have you got?" 

"The local Xandarian fleet counts a thousand starblasters in its fleet in total. Not all of them contained within this precinct, of course. There are also local fleets in Ysaros and Kryn, but not as large." Garthan couldn't help the pride that crept into his tone. 

"And you've got one?"

"All Nova Corpsmen are expected to be proficient in the use of a starblaster." 

"I meant, do you have your own ship? Assigned to you?"

"No," Garthan said, a little puzzled. "Why would I need that? All the starblasters are functionally identical."

"You are _so_ taking the shine off the life of an intergalactic policeman," Peter told him, but he was grinning, boyish again. "Denarian Dey told me that it was the best life there is, and you don't even get your own ship?"

"Acquiring a ship isn't a measure of success," Garthan said automatically, then wound himself back as the kid frowned. He took in a slow breath, then let it out without speaking. Peter could make his own decisions. But the moment stretched, and Garthan felt the guilt from the incident in the lift coming back to him, so he added, "Not for me," in what he hoped was a conciliatory manner.

"So what do you want out of life?" Peter asked, curious. "You just want to spend the rest of it doing the same thing that you do now?"

"The Nova Corps serve and protect the sum total of over forty billion citizens, Quill. It's not without its challenges." 

Peter glanced up at the starblasters, then back to Garthan. "Holy shit. So you've got maybe less than three thousand people in the Nova Corps, to police _forty billion people_? How is it that everything isn't going to hell?"

"The Worldmind makes it possible," Garthan explained. "A great deal of crime is preventable. Predictable. The Worldmind watches over the three core worlds that make up the Xandarian empire. It handles a great deal of criminal matters on its own." 

The kid thought over this for a moment as they headed down a narrow stairwell to another sleek catwalk, past a busy team of technicians. "I always thought of it as some sort of really smart database," Peter said finally. "It isn't really your boss, is it? The Xandarian Worldmind _is_ a cop. A gigantic one. All of you guys are just tools."

"To put it simplistically, yes. Key operative decisions are made by the Nova Prime, however. The Worldmind prefers to take a consultive role where possible."

"You know, in my homeworld," Peter grinned, "We have these stories. The consensus is, whenever an AI gets in charge, the world tends to go to shit."

"I presume that's indicative of a lack of civilised imagination," Garthan says reproachfully, and frowns when Peter starts to chuckle.

"I guess you guys are probably doing _something_ right. Your empire's been chugging along for a while. Xandar's a trade hub." Peter glanced back over at the ranks of starblasters, as though irresistibly. "The Worldmind's pretty old, isn't it? It'll have faced lots of threats. Different sorts of problems. Probably interstellar war, even."

"Yes it has."

"It's huge. And it's the source of the Nova Corps' power, right? The Nova Force?"

"Your point?" 

"So," Peter said, his tone deceptively mild, "Would you happen to know why this kraka thing spooked it so badly?" 

Garthan glanced at Peter sharply, then he recalled the episode in Kernel. Before that, even, when his server access had locked down so quickly. The Worldmind's disconcerting eagerness to cut deals with a Ravager. 

"You tell me," Garthan said finally, frowning. 

"I've already told you what I know."

"You can get more information. Contact..." Garthan grimaced. "Contact the Ravagers." 

Peter's expression froze. "Contact them? Nope. That's the same as asking for help. Which means all the work I've put into this venture so far would be worth fuck all." 

Garthan stared. Peter's poise was too defensive. Too tense. "Did you actually have Yondu Udonta's _permission_ to come to Xandar?" he asked at last, very dryly. 

Peter blushed a little, and stared at his feet. "It was kinda implied." When Garthan said nothing, merely walked on, Peter muttered, "Okay, not really. But he would've understood. Probably." 

"You are in so much trouble," Garthan said, not unkindly, then corrected himself. "You _are_ trouble."

Peter's only answer was a grin. "Yondu says that a hell of a lot too. Where're we going? Are you just giving me a tour?"

"Hardly." They descended another level, then Garthan scanned his palm against a panel set into the wall. A seamless door opened up, and Garthan stepped through, the adjoining, far smaller hangar space lighting up as he walked in, followed by Peter. 

Instead of the racks upon racks of starblasters, this hangar looked somewhat more prosaic: rather like a seemingly disorganised secondhand ship dealership, with tiers of ships of different sizes, from non-spacefaring civvie hovercraft to the sleek black Reaver, towering over the clamped spacecraft around it near the end of the hangar like a knife balanced on its narrow side.

" _Wow_ ," Peter said, part shock, part delight, and before Garthan could stop him, he'd darted off down the ranks of hovercraft to the impounded spacecraft, openly gawking. "You guys confiscated all this stuff?"

"Over the years," Garthan allowed. "Get back here. We're taking one of the hovercraft." 

"Is that a _necrocraft_? How even? And this! That's a Sh'iar _arka_. You guys fought with them or something? Ooh. This is a Zatoan pinnacle, right? Yondu's told me about this." Peter had skipped out of sight, and irritably, Garthan stalked after him, trying to catch up and drag the kid back to the hovercraft, but Peter skipped nimbly under fusilages and stardrive torches with casual impunity. 

When Garthan finally caught up with Peter, it was only because the kid had stopped, running his hands reverently over the belly of a dusty ship. It looked like one of the Ravager M-class ships, Garthan noted, only bigger, its bright silver-and-orange paint grown dull under the dust, and its sleek, predatory design was built for stealthy planetary approaches. 

"What's this old girl doing here?" Peter asked, his tone somewhere between affectionate and reverent. 

"It's Yondu's, I believe. Or was." 

"Probably his personal ship, custom made."

"Wouldn't you know? You're a Ravager." 

Peter pulled a face. "I wasn't allowed anywhere near Engineering. Or cargo. Or the landing bay, or service bays. Or anywhere cool inside the ship, really. All I saw of the other ships most years was through obs ports or from the outside in an enviro suit - when Yondu thought I was old enough to learn basic maintenance." 

Garthan nodded slowly. That would have been standard operating procedure on a starship where a child was involved. Confinement to the life support decks, where it was most unlikely that a kid would get underfoot - or hurt. A child that actually had some sort of status, that is. Then taught self-sufficiency, once older - until practiced enough to use spacer gestures even planetside. Peter was a mystery that was getting stranger and stranger with time. 

Peter seemed to take the nod as encouragement to continue. "The only M-class ships I've seen are way smaller. Sleeker. Two-person crew, max. For firepower we've got the warbirds now, and the titanhammers." 

Garthan nodded slowly, bringing up the impounded ship's datafile over his wrist in a holovid. "Makes sense. I doubt Yondu wants his crew ranging out too far from his _Eclector_. It's hard to enforce discipline if your crew can skip over slipspace whenever they want. This ship has a stardrive. It's just big enough to contain one. Barely."

" _Really_? A stardrive?" Peter petted the belly of the ship again, as though stroking a large and friendly animal. "And she's just sitting here, surface bound. Poor old girl." 

Garthan looked between the dusty ship, and Peter, and forced himself to say, "Are you done? I've got work to do." 

"I'm thinking that maybe I should have cut a different deal," Peter grinned at him, though he obligingly followed Garthan back to the hovercraft. "The thing I want from the Razorbacks _plus_ this ship."

"Too late."

"We can't negotiate?"

Garthan took in a deep breath. This time around, instead of just grinning at him, Peter stepped carefully out of reach, and the sight of it calmed Garthan all the way back down, an ugly twist curling up within him. He turned on his heel, activating one of the impounded civilian hovercraft - one of the many hundreds of thousands of floater cabs that were part of Xandar's highly efficient public transport system - and settled in at the driver's seat. After a moment, Peter climbed into the front passenger seat, and Garthan started up the cab, taking them up to the roof exit column.

"I'm sorry about what happened in the lift," Garthan said finally, because his conscience started to clamour all over again. "I was out of line."

Peter blinked at him in surprise, and Garthan could see the boy's confusion. It was genuine. Frowning, he elaborated, "On the way here. From Kernel?"

"Oh. That." Peter blinked again. The confusion stayed. "Um. Sure. My mouth runs away with me sometimes. It happens."

"It happens?"

"I talk too much and get slapped down," Peter shrugged. "I'm a big boy. I'll get over it." 

Years of pilot training meant that Garthan managed to complete the exit manoeuvre out of the column before swivelling in his seat to stare at Peter. 

_I talk too much and get slapped down._

_I was pretty young._

" _How_ long have you been with the Ravagers?" 

"Seven years. Why?"

Garthan stared some more. "How old were you when you joined?"

Peter was growing defensive again. "Why do you want to know?" 

Seven years with the Ravagers. As a _child_. One of the universe's most notorious pirate crews, and one of the largest. Yondu Udonta enforced discipline in his rowdy crew through sheer ruthlessness: no captured Ravager had ever betrayed the system of ports of call at which Yondu's fleet refuelled and made repairs. The Ravagers were mostly known for committing thefts and smuggling, but they also freelanced as mercenaries when the price was right. And of the twenty-five felony warrants outstanding in the Xandarian jurisdiction, no less than nineteen involved homicides. 

"Sounds like a difficult life," Garthan said slowly, carefully.

"It's not so bad."

"Why did Yondu pick up an Earther kid?"

Peter shrugged, his lips thinning. "I know what you're getting at, okay? Law enforcement, you're all the same. Even on Earth. You want to feel sorry for me. Well, fuck that. I'm happy the way I am, okay? Would I want to go back if I wasn't?"

Garthan waited, but it seemed that Peter had wised up to his trick: he said nothing further. Finally, it was Garthan who added, "I'm still sorry about the lift."

Confusion returned, displacing the wariness in Peter's poise. "Um. Don't worry about it. Seriously." 

"All right," Garthan said, and slotted them neatly into the outgoing stream of traffic, heading away from the core precinct. 

Peter squirmed for a moment, staring out of the side passenger window, then he asked, "So where are we going?"

"Afterwards? To visit some informants. Or I am. You'll be staying in the vehicle." 

"After what?"

"After you eat something," Garthan noted. "I can hear your stomach from here."

Peter blushed again, which, Garthan had to admit, deep down, was a rather good look on the kid, then he grinned, all mischief, which was even better. "Okay. But I want to visit the informants too."

"What for? You'll be in the way. Or you might spook them." 

"The way I figure this, we're partners now, at least until we both get what we want. So we work together." 

"Absolutely _not._ "

II.

"So are we undercover right now?" Peter asked, when he had shovelled down his bowl of stew and was sitting back on his chair, glossy and fed.

"Firstly," Garthan said, eating at a more civilised pace and not looking up, "There is no 'we'. You are not in the Nova Corps. Not even as a consultant. Secondly, do I look like I'm undercover?"

Peter ran a quick eye over Garthan's Corps body armour, with its matte-finish hyperion plates and its arronal underweave. It marked him out as one of the Nova Corps from a mile away, and in the centre of his body armour, the single bar of rank still glowed, proclaiming him as a Millennial. Anyone who scanned him on a face-rec would get his official file. In a crowd, he'd stick out in a glance.

"Guess not," Peter allowed, and looked a little disappointed. Whatever form of law enforcement the kid was used to on his backwater pre-spacer world had to be full of strange rituals. "So why did you take that shit-for-balls cab, when your impound hangar's chock full of some of the flashiest rides known to the 'verse?"

" _Because_ ," Garthan said evenly, "We're working. And because no one takes a second look at a cab hovercraft, understand? It's the best surveillance vehicle there is. They idle around everywhere. It's been a constant problem of the Traffic Corps for over a century."

"You said 'we'," Peter noted, and grinned at him.

Garthan decided not to dignify that with a reply, though he had to silently count to ten for patience. "Can I rely on you to stay quietly in the cab and behave yourself, or should I get you locked up in Holding?"

"The way I figure it," Peter said dryly, "If you could have locked me up in Holding and proceeded on your investigation with no fuss, you'd already have done it. So you need me for something. Oh! I know. Maybe it's because I've got a window open to the Razorbacks? Am I right? Those guys work on a hierarchy system. Whoever's biggest and baddest sits at the top. And I just apparently took out four of their guys. I've moved up their ladder of interest. Which might give us some sort of opening. Right? Am I right?"

Garthan sighed. "You're far too impressed with yourself, kid." 

"I know. It's a character flaw." 

"I was being serious. It'll get you in trouble. If it hasn't already." 

If Garthan hadn't been watching Peter carefully, he'd have missed the way Peter went still, just for a fraction of a second. Then the grin came up, and the cockiness. Situational damage control. "Trust me, _Garthan_ \- I can call you Garthan now, right? Trust me. Me and trouble? We're good friends." 

"You could avoid all this trouble," Garthan said, keeping his tone deliberately idle, as though he was winding up an afterthought. "Impound lists that M-Class ship under Lost and Found. No claimant, no theft. Not part of the Evidence listings. We removed it because it was taking up space over in a port berth with no apparent owner. With a bit of fuel and repair she could jump you anywhere in the 'verse. You could do what you want."

Peter was studying him again, as though Garthan had abruptly sprouted horns and a tail, then he started to grin. "Yeah, right. No can do. If I were to get back home to Yondu with that ship, maybe I'll be in slightly less trouble, but I'll still be where I started. _And_ he'll confiscate her."

"You don't have to go back to Yondu. You're a smart kid. You can figure out the rest of it." 

The grin vanished as quickly as it had appeared. "And you'd just give me a ship with a stardrive out of impound, just like that? Please. I wasn't born yesterday. You could probably _retire_ on what a ship like that is worth." 

"What's this thing that Yondu left with the Razorbacks?"

The about-face threw Peter long enough for him to say, "He didn't-" then he swallowed, as he caught his own slip.

Smart kid. Garthan gave him another thin smile. "The Razorbacks smuggle just about one type of goods only, kid. They're a very specialised racket. The mid tier ones tend to be. What's Yondu's interest in stolen First Races artefacts?"

"Maybe they're branching out," Peter countered. "What with the weird stim deathdrugs and all. Gave them another perspective on life." 

Garthan hadn't figured that part out yet. "The Razorbacks have been dealing with stolen First Races artefacts for _years_. It's uncharacteristic for them to change direction."

"Maybe you guys don't know them as well as you should." 

"Maybe," Garthan said, injecting just enough amused disdain in his tone for Peter to stiffen up, pride bruised. Smart, but still a kid. 

"It's not any of your business what I want to grab out of there, OK? Not part of the deal."

"I think it's in your best interests to make another offer," Garthan countered. "Help us with the Razorbacks, sure. But afterwards, turn over whatever Yondu wanted. Tell us why he wanted it. Take the M-class ship and go into business. Legitimate business. You won't need to stick to freight or haulage, not with a ship like that. You could check out some of the billion other worlds out there. Freelance planetary surveillance pays well."

He'd pushed too hard. Peter's face went tight. "You cops always think that you're _so_ smart. That you know everything. That file you've got on Yondu and the Ravagers? Fine. It's probably a hundred-per-cent true. But it's not all of it, all right? You know fuck-all about them that matters. And you don't know anything about me. Thanks for the late lunch." He stalked out of Errin's, over to where the cab was idling at the sidestreet, and leaned against the passenger door, arms folded. 

Garthan exchanged a glance at Errin, and the old Kree vendor lifted one pink-skinned shoulder into a faint shrug, before turning away to pointedly bustle around his massive stew pots. Biting down a sigh, Garthan finished up, paid, and stepped out onto the street. Peter turned his face away as he got into the front passenger seat, still sulking, and Garthan hesitated for a moment before he brought up traffic control over the dash and took the cab back up into one of the airstreams. 

He'd tried, as far as he could. Many times. So why didn't it feel like it was enough? 

In the Academy, the Centurion lecturer had told the class once that they could try their damnedest, they could bust a gut over their work, but the fact of the day was, they couldn't help everyone. It was, despite the efforts of the Worldmind, a statistical impossibility. 

_You can't help everyone._ Garthan snuck a glance over at Peter, who was still glowering out at the traffic stream as though the passing hovercraft personally offended him, and he bit down on a sigh. Most days, that sentiment was of no comfort at all.


	4. Chapter 4

I.

The Broker's shop was set up in prime Xandarian retail territory: just one top-level district away from the Core Precinct. It was an uncomfortable reminder that crime was sometimes exceedingly profitable, especially if you were the middleman. The Broker was Uulur, and like many of the rest of his species, he was intelligent, quiet and fussy. Even the crimes they committed tended, in Garthan's experience, to be intelligent, quiet and fussy.

Over his shoulder, Peter stared as they pulled up neatly in a loading zone, his earlier sulkiness already forgotten. "Your informant is here?"

"There." Garthan pointed at the Broker's shop.

"Seriously? This is like an A-grade property area, isn't it? High rent retail."

"Sadly, sometimes crime does pay." Peter made a rude gesture, and Garthan tried not to look too amused. "Where did you think we were going?"

"I dunno. Somewhere in the sublevels, past five, maybe. Around where the betting rings and the brothels are."

"Any shop on the sublevels past five would be paying protection money. Why set up there if you can set up elsewhere? The Broker runs a jewellery shop as his day job, but he's also a fence. A very specific fence, with a very specific portfolio of clients. Big commissions." 

"... People who might be interested in First Races stuff," Peter guessed. 

"That's right. Or he can point me in the right direction." 

"You know," Peter grinned, "For a place as shiny and clean as Xandar, you guys seem to overlook a hell of a lot of crime. What happened to the Worldmind taking care of it?" 

"There's an acceptable calculus of crime. Has to be, in a population this large and varied," Garthan said irritably. "The Broker sells property that may or may not be stolen. Most of the time, it's been acquired off planetary surveys. The rest of the time, it's not worth investigating and tracing unless we get a complaint. Which isn't often."

"What about gangs like the Razorbacks?"

"The gangs don't step too far out of line, and we don't come down past sublevel five unless we have reasonable cause. The arrangement's worked. Xandar's home to one of the largest populations of freelance hunters in the known 'verse. They bank in Xandar, repair their ships in Xandar, turn in their bounties here, and a lot of them upkeep homes here. They fuel an appreciable percentage of the Xandarian economy. There's a cost to that."

"You need whores and cheap drinks and bloodsports and weapon shops," Peter said, with a slow nod. "Somewhere hidden away from the shiny and clean part of Xandar and controlled. I saw that."

"That's right. It doesn't spill over up top, and we don't spill over down below. The system works." 

"Doesn't sound like you like it."

The kid was perceptive. "It doesn't matter if _I_ like it. It is how it is." 

"You know," Peter grinned, "Maybe you're too honest to be a cop." 

Garthan snorted, and started to get out of the hovercraft, hesitating only when Peter also put his hand to the door panel. "You're staying in here, kid."

"Nope. You can't make me."

"Do you really think so?"

"Yup. Unauthorised arrest, and all that. Breach of my personal freedom and liberties. Xandarians are pretty big on liberties. Especially regarding offworlders." 

"Not if you're impeding the course of justice."

"Aww, come _on_ ," Peter whined. "I want to come along. Please. Pretty please. I solemnly swear that I will behave myself." 

This situation was getting patently ridiculous. "Fine," Garthan growled, "But I'm confiscating that blaster."

"What? Why?"

"Is it licensed?"

"I was... going to get around to it?" Peter asked hopefully, but when Garthan stretched out his hand, he sighed, and handed the blaster over, stock first. Garthan removed the charge cell, pocketed it, and tossed the inert blaster into the back seat. 

"You're such a hardass," Peter grumbled, as he stood on the sidewalk with his hands shocked into his breeches pockets, watching as Garthan scanlocked the cab. "What if you needed help? I could have backed you up with that blaster."

"I don't need help." 

"Yeah? What was all that talk about being able to call in your Corps friends at any time, then? You said that like you'd done it before." 

"I don't need _your_ help," Garthan corrected. 

Peter sulked for a while as they walked at a sedate pace towards the Broker's shop, then, as Garthan had expected, the kid started talking again. He'd met few people, offworlders or otherwise, with such a love of their own voice. "If we're not undercover, and we're just doing informant stops, why'd we take the cab? Or are you just categorically against having fun?"

"Surveillance is for later. Strong possibility." 

"If you barge into Razorback territory with that cab, it still won't hide the fact that you're obviously a cop. When you step out of it." 

Garthan opened his mouth, about to explain, then he smirked instead, in a way that he knew - or hoped - would annoy Peter the most. "Watch and learn, kid."

"Oh my _God_ ," Peter groaned, but Garthan had stepped up briskly to the entryway of the Broker's shop, and looked straight into the identifier, allowing it to read his official file. 

The Broker greeted Garthan a little nervously at the door. "Millennian Saal. What a pleasure. What can I do for you today?"

Garthan tried to keep his peripheral vision trained on Peter as the boy looked curiously at all the various gewgaws that the Broker put on display plinths in his shop. Worthless gadgets and jewellery compared to the under-the-counter trade that the Broker did as his main source of income, of course, but at least it was utterly legitimate trade. 

"Have you had any dealings with the Razorbacks recently?" 

"Re-recently?" The Broker had scooted behind his desk, and now he pressed his palms against the edge of it, as though it was some sort of fortification. "Ah, you do know, my contacts are subject to the utmost confidentiality-"

"Yes, yes," Garthan cut in, "Usually I'd be pleased to do the usual song and dance, where you deny knowing the Razorbacks, and I start escalating my inquiries, but today I'm very busy, and the Razorbacks have actually done something that may have irritated the Worldmind. So."

"The _Worldmind_!" The Broker's eye ridge raised in surprise. "How did that even...?"

"That's what I would like to find out. Now, are you going to cooperate?"

The Broker's gaze flicked nervously over to Peter then back to Garthan. "Understand that I am doing this under duress and you haven't read me my rights." 

"This won't be a matter for the courts. As I've mentioned, the Worldmind is concerned."

"All right. Ah. No, I have not had any dealings with the Razorbacks recently." 

"That's it? After all that?" Peter demanded, his tone incredulous.

"Shut up," Garthan directed over his shoulder without turning around. "Go on." 

"Neither, to my knowledge, has any fence of their... specialised supplies... had any dealings with them recently," the Broker added, his hands twitching a little. "'Recently' being a period between now and one and a half cycles." 

Garthan's eyebrows rose. "Who managed their last deal?"

"I did," the Broker admitted. "It was, ah, the usual."

"The usual?"

"A very exquisite vase, if you must know, acquired by me on behalf of a most discerning personage." The Broker let out a soft sigh. "The market in First Races artefacts hasn't quite been the same."

"The Razorbacks were that big a player?" 

"No, no. It's happening everywhere. Across the 'verse," the Broker corrected fussily. "There are no First Races artefacts in circulation. Not for a cycle, at the least. Nowhere. No one's trading in them. The sources just seem to have dried up."

"Dried up? Across the universe?" Garthan echoed. "Not possible." 

"Stranger things have happened," the Broker shrugged, then hesitated. "Though, not by very much. It's not unheard of for a market as lucrative as First Races collectibles to go suddenly dry, but it's quite surprising, given the fad for them was still very much strongly in place. I have a number of clientele who have been most disappointed by the development." 

"Do you know what happened to the Razorbacks since?" Peter asked curiously, and ducked his head when Garthan half-turned to glower at him.

"Well, no," the Broker looked surprised to have even been asked. "I try not to involve myself in the... details of the supply end of my business overmuch. They do tend to be rather upsetting." 

"Thank you for your time," Garthan said firmly, and grabbed Peter by his elbow, all but marching him out of the shop. 

"'They do _tend_ to be _rather_ upsetting'," Peter mimicked the Broker's fussy tone, and snickered as Garthan let out a sigh. 

"You said you would be quiet."

"Nope, I said that I was going to behave myself," Peter corrected him. "And I did. There were at least five things I could score in there even with you trying to watch me, and I didn't touch any of them. What next?"

"I'm tempted to drop you off in Holding, that's what's next." 

" _Aww_ come _on_. What happened to 'watch and learn'?" 

"How in the Worldmind did you survive seven years with the Ravagers?" Garthan muttered. 

"By being small, fast and smart," Peter answered anyway, with a sharp grin. "But now I'm not so small, so I need a brand new bachelor pad." 

"Can't fit into the vent ducts anymore?" Garthan asked casually.

"You've got the wrong idea about the Ravagers, man," Peter retorted, as he got into the front passenger seat, strapping down as Garthan settled in and palmed up traffic controls. 

"Do I? Peter, I started in Vice. Worked there for five years across all three Core precincts before getting transferred to Homicide. I know the signs."

"Yeah?" The edge had crept back into Peter's tone. 

"Children who grow up in violent environments either turn out really quiet: doll-like, even - they'd stay victims most of their lives, if they don't get help. Or they become abusive, aggressive and vicious, and they'll end up in the system sooner or later. But a few, rare ones turn out like you."

"Like me?"

"Highly independent. Restless. Quick to turn defensive. Always with a solution. Not always a legal solution. A way out. You've got an overdeveloped survivor's instinct." Garthan deliberately didn't look at Peter as he said this. "You've long learned that the only person you can really trust or depend on is yourself. So you don't trust easy, and you'd rather cut a deal than get beholden. But you still want to defend the people you grew up with because you've got no one else."

"You don't know anything about me."

"So I'm wrong about you?"

"That's what I'm saying."

"Live and learn," Garthan said, his tone deliberately challenging. "Tell me then. How am I wrong about you?"

"My dad skipped out of town before I was born, and my mom was never right in the head after that. Kept claiming my dad was an 'angel'. Not even figuratively, you know?" Peter stared hard at his hands for a moment. "I could tell something maybe wasn't quite right about that, even when I was real young, the way my granddad reacted whenever she said it. But how was I to know? So I went to elementary school. Me, a little kid, not knowing any fucking better." 

"Mom and I lived in a small town in Missouri. Maybe it was because of that, maybe not. Earther kids, maybe they're the same the world over. First day of school, I nearly drowned. Got my head held down in a toilet bowl. It got worse for a few months. Wound up in hospital once. Then I got into my first growth spurt, faster than the others, learned how to fight back and fight dirty." Peter shrugged. "It didn't always help. The day my mom died, I had a black eye. Also a mild concussion and a cracked rib. Fun times." 

Garthan frowned. "That's-"

"So... sure. The Ravagers aren't nice folks. Sure, I've gotten into their way before, in the early days, and I didn't always get out of it quickly enough. Sure, if I step too far out of line, I know Yondu would sooner shoot me than forgive me. But they've never called my mom a whore to my face. They've never broken my things just because they could. They've never kicked the shit out of me just for being different. And they've bailed me out of trouble before. As far as I'm concerned," Peter said venomously, his eyes narrowed, "They saved my _life_ when they grabbed me off Earth. So don't _fucking pity me_."

II.

The next two informants confirmed the Broker's story, but didn't have much else to add, so Garthan bought a few wraps and a couple of cups of black for dinner and they ate with the cab idling off an unobtrusive corner in sublevel 6. Peter had been stiff and quiet all afternoon and into the evening, and Garthan wasn't exactly sure what to say. Or if he should even say anything. He was vaguely tempted to try and dump the problem of Peter back into Denarian Dey's lap, since this was Dey's fault in the first place, but he didn't think that Peter would react well.

And besides, it was never really in Garthan's personality to hand off his own problems to others, even if he was out of his depth. So he ate, and read shipping manifests, and tried to ignore the problem sitting in the front passenger seat beside him.

In the end, it was Peter that broke the silence first. "What are we doing now?"

Garthan glanced at him, but Peter's expression showed only a sort of wary curiosity, so he gestured at the holovid. "Checking through any imports that the Razorbacks may have earmarked." 

"What for? You already know they're up to no good." 

"I need probable cause for a search. Also, I'd like to know the extent of the problem, if possible. And besides, the Razorbacks can't be the brains of an operation like this. If they're the manufacturer-"

"Then there's got to be a buyer?" 

"Probably. Offworld, perhaps. If the drug's highly contagious, we'd have known by now. The Worldmind's heavily burrowed into the medical system. Even the black market shops. Somehow it's being contained."

"Not so well contained," Peter swiped his hand left and right - _dismissive, sarcastic_. "Considering one of the infected walked right out to talk to me."

"The recycling plant's within Razorback territory. He didn't exactly walk 'right out'. And none of the kraka symptoms have so far been reported in any clinic." Garthan continued to scroll briskly through the lines of information.

"And so we're sitting on the perimeter of Razorback territory, right now, eating our dinner, breaking the Nova Corps' neat little arrangement about the sublevels, and doing what?" Peter asked dryly. When Garthan glanced at him, Peter added, "I've got eyes and I'm not stupid. This is why we needed one of these shit-for-balls cabs, right?"

"All right," Garthan said reluctantly. "Normally, there's a lookout posted over there, at that cornershop."

"'Best All Service Kree Massages'?" Peter read out aloud. "Brothel?"

"Licensed." 

"I thought the Razorbacks were a smuggling gig."

"First Races artefacts tend to be extremely high value items, and the Broker doesn't really give a damn who he deals with, as long as he gets the item. So the Razorbacks have good security. To have good security, you need to control the territory and have an outer perimeter, even if some of it is rented out to other 'businesses'." Garthan paused. "Or they _had_ good security."

"So we're going to walk right in? Right now?" 

"I thought I mentioned something about probable cause...?" 

"You need a warrant?" 

Allspeak struggled a little, but managed to correlate the term. "The concept is similar." 

Peter finished his wrap and drank his cup of black. Then he shrugged. "OK." 

"Wha-" Garthan yelped as Peter suddenly shoved him hard, banging his shoulder against the side of the cab. As he reared around to snap at the kid, he blinked as he saw that his blaster was now in Peter's hands. Grinning, Peter sheathed the blaster into his hip holster. "Give that back."

"Is stealing from the Nova Corps bad?" 

"It's a felony-"

"Okay then, now I'm also resisting arrest," Peter said cheerfully, and palmed the door open before Garthan could react, sprinting off in the direction of the brothel.

Cursing under his breath, Garthan was out of the cab in a second, but Peter was already past the brothel and accelerating, and Garthan grimaced as he ran after him. It was a lawman's instinct. The perp ran, the lawman ran. It occurred to him for a moment that chasing Peter into Razorback territory in full uniform was probably an extremely bad idea, but no one tried to get in his way, no one even tried to look too hard. 

Collapsing outer perimeter. Garthan slowed down, pinged his link to the Nova Force, and the glowing bar of rank over his chestplate dimmed to nothing, the refraction receptors on his suit winking briefly before they activated, a visor folding over his face like scaffolding unwinding. Now when he would register as a smudge in dim light, and nothing in less, and his footsteps went soundless as he turned down a narrow passageway between a stimshop and a stasis-wrapped chamber, its sad little _Final Rent Notice_ holosign flickering dimly over the stat-sealed door. 

He caught up with Peter outside the recycling plant that had housed the bodies of the three vics only a day ago. It was still marked out as a Further Interest crime scene, with the Nova Corps ticker tape in a pale blue hololine over the mouth of the open entryway, but the Nova Corps had come and gone. 

A day ago, when he had been here, the Corps perimeter had been bustling with curious onlookers, the cheap sublevel lights harsh all around them. Now the lights were dimmed down, and the sublevel streets and alleys and shops all around the recycling plant were disconcertingly empty, the only illumination from the Nova Corps tape and a surrounding ring of orange _Final Notice - Utilities_ holosigns in nearby shops. 

That wasn't right. Recycling plants usually worked around the clock. Especially on a planet as densely populated as Xandar. And what had happened to the shops?

"You're impossible," Garthan muttered, and Peter jumped for a moment before he squinted, concentrating. 

"That's a cool trick," Peter murmured back. "I can't even really see you, and I'm standing right next to you." He made a show of patting the air, and Garthan swatted his hands aside, repossessing his blaster and slotting it grumpily back into his holster.

"Don't do that again."

"The gun, or the probable cause?" Peter asked innocently, and Garthan snorted.

"Get back to the cab and stay in there."

"What about you?"

Garthan glanced around again. "Something isn't right. I'm going to take a look."

"Well, if you've already caught me, do you still have a reason to be here?" Peter grinned, then he raised his hands, palms-up, when Garthan sighed. "Two sets of eyes are better than one, right? Let's both go take a look."

"No."

"Or I'll wait till you're gone, then circle back and take a look anyway." 

"Or I could march you back to the cab and cuff you to the seat."

"Then you won't have a real reason to head back in here, right? You can't tell the Worldmind, 'Well sir, but then I had to come back to the recycling plant because it was all empty and quiet and it gave me the creeps'." 

Garthan stared at Peter sourly. "I think I've just decided never to have children."

"Aww, you say the _sweetest_ things."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wiki notes that 'Members of the Nova Corps are invested with a small portion of the Nova Force, which is the source of their abilities. The basic abilities of a Nova Corpsman include gravimetric flight, reduced need for oxygen, reduced need for food/water, gravimetric shield generation, and various types of energy beam projection.'
> 
> Since we didn't see any flying people in the film (the Nova Corps used Starblasters to go anywhere), I'm thinking the gravimetric flight is out of the picture, but everything else is free game.

I.

Garthan was briefly tempted to ping the Worldmind and activate the seal on the Nova Corps holotape, which would allow any Nova Corpsman to pass but act as a stasis wall for anyone else, but as though anticipating this thought, Peter stepped through the holotape first, activating some sort of visor that slipped up over his face and gave him a vaguely insectoid look.

Peter held up a hand to his ear, middle finger and index finger up, as though activating an earpiece, and Garthan nodded, switching his visor comm to an encrypted two-way, and pinged Peter. He got an answer immediately: Peter's voice, fed straight to his ear implant. "Looks like they shut this place down after you guys cleared out." 

Garthan nodded, even though he knew Peter wouldn't see it. His visor told him that the atmosphere beyond was clear, toxicology clean, and so he stepped further into the dark, the visor amplifying his Force-enhanced vision, making the most of the dim light from the holotape. The recycling plant looked more or less like the way he had left it. 

Vast chemical silos squatted at even intervals in the gigantic room, some for processing waste into water and biofuel, some for bio-manufacturing yeast and reconstituents, to feed right back up to low sublevel homes, waiting on cheap meal cards to be fed into sub-rate replicators. Down by the far right, the incinerator sat cold and dark, its slotted mouths open and forgotten. 

"Recycling plants are one of the core bits of any sort of self-contained settlement, right?" Peter was moving further into the dark. "I'm guessing it was probably a key part of their 'perimeter'. People got to eat and drink." 

"I would really prefer you to go back to the cab," Garthan muttered. 

"I can take care of myself."

"You're unarmed."

"Whose fault is that, eh?"

"I'm not going to singlehandedly invade the Razorbacks without knowing what I'm getting myself into. Get back to the cab." 

"In that case," Peter said, his tone heavy with irritating amusement, "Then I'm gonna be perfectly safe right here with you, Officer. While who knows what might be out there. I might be kidnapped by rogue Xandarian elements."

Garthan snorted, and walked over to where the first body had been found, leaned up against one of the silos. The glow-in-the-dark corpse marker paint was still good for at least another half a day. He pinged the Worldmind, and the marker paint flickered for a moment, then the nanoreceptors within it came to life, projecting a perfect 3D impression of the body. Blaster fire, centre mass. Without body armour, the Razorback must have died nearly instantly - judging from the shot, it was a pulse gun set to red: instant cardiac arrest. 

He activated the second and third corpse paints, and recalculated the original hypothesis that the forensic techs had built up, but Peter had already guessed at his intent and had walked over to stand behind a maintenance console, half-hidden by the dull metallic sheen of the cylindrical hub.

"Infected guy stood here," Peter said. "They started arguing. He shot the first guy and the second guy." 

Garthan looked at the third body. Judging from where the 3D image was slumped, partly out of cover behind a thick ridge of yeast piping... he walked over to a pressure valve set against one of the silos, near an exhaust vent, and studied the scratched catches. "You shot the last one while taking cover behind the pressure valve. Then climbed into the vent and pulled the grille after you."

Peter glanced over at the body. "Yep. Guess I'm still small enough for _some_ vents, huh." 

"Where did it lead?"

"I got out in a service tunnel and made it out before anyone checked the plant."

"So it was an ambush." Recycling plants were usually full of techs.

"Yeah. It was pretty obvious." 

"And you walked into it anyway?" 

Peter shrugged. "No pain, no gain." 

"I don't believe that for an instant. You're not that stupid."

"I've got grav boots and a few tricks. If they were gonna deal, fine. If not, I was going to light out of there before they could catch me."

"You came here penniless, Quill. And you probably stowed away on two separate ships to get here. I don't even know how you got off the _Eclector_ , but it probably involved theft somehow. So what in the Worldmind made you think that the Razorbacks would take you seriously, let alone agree to a trade?"

"I wasn't going to _trade_ ," Peter sounded offended at the suggestion. "I just wanted to know if they still had the thing. I wasn't dressed as a Ravager. Just as an independent agent. Posing as a scout for a new fence."

"You don't even remotely look the part," Garthan shook his head slowly. "You saw where the Broker's shop is. Would they send a representative out who wasn't dressed up and accompanied by an enforcer? Besides, you're too young."

Peter laughed. "I was gonna act all embarrassed and tell them that my Master had told me to Blend In, that I'd never been past sublevel two before, that we lived on some fancy island out in the middle of nowhere with a shit ton of other dumb servitors like me. It was worth a shot." He sobered up just as quickly. "But then the infected guy showed up, and I never got around to my story." 

"... so there were three Razorbacks at first. Then a fourth?"

"Yeah. Wasn't that what I said?"

Garthan sighed. "No, you said that there were four. I thought the infected Razorback arrived with the others. This changes a few key premises. Start again. In detail." 

"Okay, fine." Peter stepped back over to the tape. "I walked in here. They were waiting over where the the first dead guy is. All three."

Within sight of the door. And all three, not just one Razorback with the other two out of sight. "So it wasn't an ambush."

"Not the sort where they jump you when you walk in and whack you on the head, no. So I walked up to here," Peter ambled in casually, up to a set of floor-to-ceiling pipes thicker than Garthan's arms. Visually, it looked like Peter was taking a stroll into the plant for a face to face talk. Tactically, it put Peter right next to phaser-proof plexisteel piping, made by Asgardian tech to last for centuries. 

"And then?"

"We made the usual asshole pleasantries where I pretended to be an interested tourist and they pretended that they didn't know what I was after. You know, the usual. I was just about to tell them the made-up story about the island collector when the fourth guy came in. From here." Peter walked briskly in a diagonal to a door set in the side of the gigantic plant, marked SERVICE-TWO, according to Garthan's enhanced sight. The walk took almost thirty seconds, Peter's grav boots tinkling dully in the cavernous space. The visor marked Peter out as a bluish outline.

"He walked straight at the other three?"

"Not really. He just walked in. Stumbled. Started heading towards the door, I think. He stopped when he saw that we were near it. Then he came closer, I saw the symptoms, and freaked out." 

"You said they started arguing among themselves?"

"Yeah, the three guys. They were trying to decide whether I was full of shit. The second dead guy had heard a rumour out of Knowhere, blown a bit out of proportion, but he was jumpy over something. Kept saying 'I _told_ you, I _told_ you' to the first guy, as though he had seen God or something." 

"The fourth guy didn't speak?"

"Nope. Too busy. The second guy drew his blaster, the third guy started yelling, then the infected guy drew his blaster, then they were all shooting and I was ducking and running."

"Away from the door?"

"Are you kidding me? I could see two sentries on my way in. There was one off in the side alley next to the piled crates and one in the second floor of that stasis-frozen gen store. What d'you think would've happened if I had ducked out of the door in a firefight?"

Garthan nodded. The space immediately around the recycling plant had no easy cover. A killing ground. "Maybe you shouldn't have walked right in. In the first place."

"No pain, no gain. Besides, I didn't _intend_ for there to be a fucking firefight. I was _prepared_ to do it diplomatically."

"Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst." Garthan glanced between Peter's position and the first dead body. "Back to the situation. You were ducking and running...?"

"Yeah. One of Yondu's rules. 'If you wanna fuck shit up, at least make sure that it's shit that you can handle, or get the fuck out of the way'. So I got out of the way. Four guys is a bit much with no gadgets. The infected guy shot this guy first," Peter mimed firing a blaster, one quick, steady shot. "Then the other guy." Another quick blast.

"That's strange."

"That he got them both?" 

"No. I presume Yondu taught you how to shoot?"

"Not exactly." Peter's voice sounded puzzled. "He told Proctos to teach me how to shoot. Which I guess is about the same."

"A Krylorian?"

"Good guess." 

"I don't guess," Garthan said absently. Krylorians tended to lead complacent lives - he'd never heard of a Krylorian in the spacer business, let alone one becoming a pirate. But then again, the Ravagers did tend to collect oddballs and outcasts. "What did Proctos teach you about shooting?"

"He said it depends on the asshole," Peter noted, and Garthan could hear his amusement. "But for bipedal persons, two shots into centre mass. One shot to kill, the second for insurance. Don't fuck with trying to get a headshot to score brownie points. If the other guy's dead, you've scored all the brownie points you'd ever need to. So, shooting twice wherever centre mass is. Unless it's one of the Nova Corps, in which case you just run like hell." 

"Flattery won't get you anywhere." 

"I get your point though. Two perps, both shot through centre mass, right over the heart, single shots, no double-tap. While he had the shakes. But his aim had to have been rock steady to do that. He _knew_ he got in two kill shots. And when he was shooting, his arms were steady."

Garthan nodded. It was a strange inconsistency. "What happened next?"

"Anyway. Third guy took cover. They squeeze off some shots, then the third guy gets lucky. Pulse shot in the arm, disarms infected guy, then third guy finishes him off with a few money shots to the chest. Then he tries to get me. We shoot it out for a bit, and I come out tops. I grab some tech's gloves off the wall, drag the infected guy over to the incinerator, burn his body and the gloves, then I run for it."

"You seemed certain that you wouldn't be interrupted."

"Ah, well," Peter walked back, and tapped a finger over the maintenance console. "One guy goes in, he doesn't come out, the sentries aren't too worried. Not at first. I figured I had the time." 

"But you would have run out of time by the time you left. You were injured." 

"I gave them something else to worry about." Amusement again. "I called you guys anonymously the moment I was in the service tunnel. Said I was a janitor. I figured I had to: I hadn't seen any Nova Corps past sublevel five. Your response time is pretty good. The bodies were probably still a little warm by the time you guys piled into here. I skirted the security cordon and lit out of there to your place."

Garthan shook his head slowly, looked around the plant again, and walked over to the door marked SERVICE-TWO. A surface scan indicated that the door was unlocked, and there were no lifesigns beyond it or any nasty surprises. 

"Wait. We're going in?" Peter had slunk closer. 

" _I'm_ going in. I have a stealth array, you don't."

"You're juiced up on the Nova Force. I bet if there were people behind this door you wouldn't have forced me to clunk around demonstrating how the shooting went down." 

"... Fine." Garthan sighed. "But stay behind me."

II.

The service tunnel was pitch dark, which wasn't a problem for Garthan, even if he wasn't wearing his visor. He had been hoping that it would make Peter spooked enough to wait out in the cab, but yet again, he was disappointed. The visor Peter was wearing was also good for zero-light visibility, whatever it was.

"If you're coming in with me, then I want you to stay with me."

"Sure," Peter said breezily.

"I mean it. No running off into side corridors to look for Yondu's thing."

"Garthan," Peter said dryly, "We're walking into possibly a den of infected armed perps and you think I'm going to sneak off to explore? Instead of hiding behind a Denarian like a sane person?"

"Temporary Denarian," Garthan corrected absently. The corridor was long, and on a gradual downward gradient. In the distance his zero-light vision was mapping out an intersection. 

"Is that what's been bugging you all this time? That you'd have to give your toys back?" 

"Hardly," Garthan retorted, but it was too quick - Peter laughed. 

"I knew it. Look. You're a damn good officer, OK? No flattery intended, even. I'm pretty sure about that. I think you deserve to be a Denarian, at the least. Maybe at the end, when you close this case, they'd make that rank permanent."

"There's more to being a Denarian than being good at case work," Garthan said stiffly.

"Really? What's the criteria?"

"That's up to the Worldmind." 

"I'm sure you've figured out a thing or two."

Garthan exhaled. "Denarians are exemplary officers."

"But?"

"And Denarian Rhomann Dey is a classic example of one."

Peter was silent for a moment, up until they reached the intersection, then he said, "They're all bleeding hearts?"

"They all _care_. Emphatically. More than duty requires. They have a different and broader understanding of the greater good. So there's a greater two-way from the Worldmind."

"Okay, firstly, I don't believe that you don't care. Or you wouldn't have been bitching at me all this time about Yondu. You wouldn't have let me stay over at your place." Peter said mulishly. "If the Worldmind can't see that, then maybe it should be told."

"The Worldmind knows everything that I know. More."

"It's watching you all the time?"

Garthan turned briefly away from examining a stain on the ground. "Didn't you hear what it said in Kernel? 'We are many things. We are one thing. We are the Nova Corps. The Nova Corps are we.'" 

"Yeah. Creepy shit."

"Where do you think the Worldmind is housed?"

"Um." Peter hesitated. "I was thinking maybe you guys had a floor of servers or something, around that creepy white room."

"No non-organic computer made can contain the Worldmind." Garthan straightened up. "Not even anything made by Asgard."

"Non-organic... you _guys_ are the servers?" 

"Yes. Nearly three thousand 'access' nodes. The Nova Corps influence the Worldmind, even as it influences us. And it has a greater... presence with officers of increasing rank. The Nova Corps chosen into service, in a way, help to decide every policy in the Xandarian empire. So, yes," Garthan said evenly, "I don't like how you've strong-armed the Worldmind into giving me Denarian access when I was assessed as a Millennian."

"You think you don't deserve it," Peter said slowly. "Well, that's bullshit." 

"It is what it is." There wasn't any more residual heat, but bio-organic tracking indicated that the last time the right intersection had been used was three days ago. The left intersection had been used more recently: many tracks in, only one out. "This way." 

The recycling plant led right to dorm-like living quarters that, from the brief glance he took from the doorway, vaguely reminded Garthan of the Academy, if the Academy had smelled persistently of yeast and a background acrid tang of processing waste. It was still dark, and Garthan began to feel increasingly uneasy, glancing at the inert illum lines that ran along the sides of the tunnel, about a hand's breadth from the flat ceiling. 

He nearly flinched when Peter said, "Shouldn't the lights in this place run automatically off the biofuel?"

"If the plant was running, yes." 

"Isn't it a serious problem that it's not?"

"Overall? Not particularly. There are other recycling plants on the sublevel. To lose one isn't catastrophic, just inconvenient. But it would explain the circle of 'Final Notice - Utilities' shops around it." 

"But the outer perimeter was still running," Peter began, then he paused. "Because those were real, actual businesses that could start looking for alternatives. Everything else was a Razorback front that leeched off their recycling plant."

"That's right." 

"So what the hell happened to the Razorbacks?"

"Still thinking." Garthan hesitated for a moment. "Peter, hold out your hand." 

Peter held out his right hand instantly, then he tensed when Garthan put his blaster in it, stock first. "Um-"

"I have a stealth array, you don't." 

Peter checked the chambered charge, then the safety, then held it at the idle position, muzzle pointing at the ground. Whatever Proctos had done or had been, he was a good weaponsmaster teacher. "Aww, I knew you liked me."

Garthan was thankful for the dark, and for his visor. He was pretty sure his ears were red. "Dragging your body out of here if something happened would be a pain in the ass."

"But now you're unarmed."

"As I am now? I'm never unarmed." Garthan replied, but didn't clarify, and Peter didn't push. Taking a slow breath, Garthan hesitated for a moment more, at the doorway, then he stepped in.


	6. Chapter 6

I.

The Razorbacks' living quarters were undisturbed. No evidence of violence. No evidence of anything packed up. People had lived here, and then people were gone, as neatly as someone editing a photograph. There were even unfinished mugs of homebrew rotgut on one of the tables, with an open span of cards.

Peter walked right up to the table, peered at the cards, then pointed at one of the empty chairs. "This guy was winning. Hell of a time to fold." 

Garthan wasn't fooled. There was a shaky edge to Peter's voice now. The empty recycling plant had been fine, as had the corridor, but Peter's overdeveloped survivor's instinct was clamouring for his attention in the vast, empty open space. "Go wait in the cab."

"No."

"I'm serious. There's nothing for you here. I'm going to call it in." 

"So call it in now." 

Garthan hesitated, then sighed. "I hate mysteries."

"I know." Amusement warred with wariness in Peter's tone. "You seem like the sort."

A careful circuit of the main living space in the empty quarters revealed nothing of real interest. Some unlicensed weaponry, at worst. But no First Races artefacts. No people. 

"When you guys came down into the plant, did you see other Razorbacks?" Peter asked, running a palm over the counter of the makeshift bar next to the card table. There was a piece of microfilm cloth still pressed on the counter, abandoned in mid-wipe, the soap and water long dried.

"Yes. And they weren't infected, before you ask. We were polite, they were polite, they ID'd the bodies, then swore blind they had no idea what happened and were looking for the culprit. We put it down to territory warfare, stuck the holotape over the door and got out." Garthan closed his eyes briefly, thinking back. "They seemed nervous, but I put that down to our intrusion rather than anything else." 

"So this was pretty recent. Like, within the last day or so." 

They didn't follow the corridors to check adjoining rooms, but Garthan had the gut instinct that everything would be the same. He took in a slow breath, then walked to the back of the living quarters, to the heavy door set pointedly in the wall, a DNA-locked security challenge to intruders. Garthan didn't doubt that perhaps one and a half cycle or so ago, only a handful of highly trusted Razorbacks would have had access to the door, and it would have proved a hell of a problem for the average intruder.

Thankfully, he _wasn't_ an average intruder. He pinged the Worldmind, and it got to work. Three seconds later, the door issued a pneumatic hiss, almost like a sigh, and swung slowly open.

The smell that hit him was like nothing Garthan had ever smelled, even working in Vice. It was something like the sickly sweet rot of decaying flesh, only worse, riper, almost acidic. There was a charnel scent, like a burst digestive gut. And below it all, there was a smell like heated metal, alien but still inexplicably organic. It made the bile rise in his throat, even after all the years he had put into Vice and Homicide. 

Garthan took an involuntary step back, swallowing hard, and behind him, Peter whispered, "Well, fuck."

"Let me guess. That's the Knowhere smell."

"I thought you didn't guess." Peter paused.

"Rhetorical statement." 

"The two Ravagers who got back from Knowhere? Their clothes stank just like this. But it wasn't as concentrated." Peter shuddered. "Kraglin called it 'Dead Celestial Perfume'. Now what?"

"Mystery partly over." Garthan pinged the Worldmind again with a general query and a request for backup, and waited. 

"So we're not going in."

"I'm calling it in. And _then_ I'll head in. With backup." 

"So I guess the circus is going to show up soon?"

"That's why I wanted you to wait in the cab." 

"It's OK," Peter said, amused. "I still fit in the vent ducts in this place. But I guess I might head off to find one now, if that's all right with you. Before all your friends get here." 

There was a strange, buzzing tension in the back of his mind, then the Worldmind replied, more sensation-curiosity than words. _Proceed_. 

_Without backup?_ Garthan replied without thinking, a spark of surprise in his own mind. 

_Proceed_. 

Puzzled, Garthan hesitated, silent, and Peter asked, "Problem?"

"No. Backup's coming. You should go now."

"You're a really bad liar." Peter said, his tone still amiable, but tense. "What the fuck. They hung you out to dry? Does this happen often?"

"Stay out here. I mean it." 

"Don't you need a hazmat suit or something?"

"My suit's fully enclosed. I'm heading in now. Go back to the cab," Garthan said, as confidently as he could, and forced himself to step through the door into the dark, suppressing his instinctive flinch. His link to the Nova Force told him that Peter hadn't moved, still staring into the doorway, then the kid turned around, heading back up into the living quarters.

Garthan relaxed. He had been worried that Peter would have tried to come in after him. And in the small chance that any Razorbacks rolled in from the outside, Peter would be armed, and he had time to scope out the grounds.

The blast door would lead to the armoury and to the treasury, Garthan guessed. Some offices. And maybe the lab. He was right on the first two counts. A dark opening to his right, the door ajar, led to a neat cubical room filled with racks of licensed and unlicensed weaponry. Possession of some of the unlicensed weaponry _types_ were felonies in their own right. Garthan called it in, but the Worldmind didn't respond. 

Still no one.

The second room was a few steps away, opening to his left. This one involved another blast door that the Worldmind obligingly unlocked when pinged, and Garthan walked into yet another cubical room, this one full of pressure casing, stacked in a corner. The rest of the room was empty. Garthan scanned it with zero-light vision, then with the Nova Force, and came up with a curious hollow depression in one of the walls, low on the ground. He walked over, bent, and pressed it, and there was a dull click. 

A section of the wall slewed open, and a console lit up, a dull orange in the darkness, throwing weird shadows off the walls. Garthan glanced briefly at the text on the screen - all supply and export manifests - and pinged the Worldmind. The text began to scroll on its own as the Worldmind dodged past the security and made a copy, and Garthan headed out of the room, clenching and unclenching his fists. Still more to go.

The next room was an office. It looked prosaic, but Garthan had been expecting no less. Desk, holovid projector consoles, even a dying potted plant in a corner. Hazan Razorback ran a tight ship, in a very specialised sort of work. He probably _did_ have another office out in the living quarters, just for show and any specialised intimidation matters, bigger, more impressive, with more menacing furniture and equipped with heavy duty weaponry, but unlike this one, it'd probably have a tiled floor, not carpet. It was hard to get blood off carpet. 

The curious thing about the room was what _wasn't_ there. 

Little plaques had been hung on the wall, presumably once with 'exquisite' First Races artefacts gravved to them. They were empty, and recently so, judging from the slight difference in dust layers. 

And there was a small little grav cradle on the table, pride of place. Also empty. Garthan picked it up, examining it. It had once held something round, probably smaller than his fist. He passed a hand over the top, and it flickered. Still charged. 

Garthan looked around the room again. The first two long plaques were probably First World artefact weapons. Blades, perhaps. It was the sort of thing that a Razorback boss might like to see when he was working. Trophy items: Hazan Razorback's private collection. The ones set behind him were evenly spaced, head-sized. The Worldmind managed to cobble up a projected outline based on the residual grav signature, but Garthan couldn't quite figure it out from the strange shapes. Art, maybe. 

But the little grav cradle - now that was interesting, and not just to him: Garthan could feel the Worldmind's curiosity, clinical and detached but still there. He turned it around again, and the Worldmind studied it for a moment through his Force-enhanced senses, and came back with a little projection of a sphere. Smaller than his fist. Not too heavy. 

Shrugging, Garthan pinged the Worldmind over the holovid console, and it started up. He left the Worldmind to it, and stepped back out into the corridor.

 _Proceed?_ he asked it, hoping for the best, sending the Worldmind his misgivings, his suspicion, his impressions. 

"Proceed, Acting-Denarian Saal." Not even an answering ping, this time. An order. Loud and clear, right into his ear implant.

Garthan winced at the clinical voice's precision. Took in another breath. Then he walked towards the final door, set at the end of the corridor, and pinged the Worldmind to open it.

II.

The stink was coming from this room, Garthan was sure of it: it was so intense that his visor had automatically compensated just to keep him from gagging. As it was, it made him dizzy for a fraction of a second before the Nova Force corrected his brain chemistry, clearing off the discomfort and buffering him with temporary stimulants. Garthan called up an all-body Force shield, just in case, and took another wary step.

This was a delivery bay, Garthan guessed, half as large as the living quarters - or it once had been. Unlicensed single-seater street mobs still sat in neat ranks against one wall, while at the other was a small service bay, workshop benches and all. Garthan had no doubt that the large blast door that occupied the end of the room probably unobtrusively led up to sublevel 4 traffic lanes. 

Stain and dust patterns told Garthan and the Worldmind that until perhaps a day or so ago, there had also been two armoured hovercarriers that had occupied pride of place next to the workshop, heavy enough to rival even the ones used by duty finance. But Garthan wasn't paying attention. He was staring at the squat, gelatinous cube near the centre of the room, taller than him, stretching almost to the ceiling, like some odd sort of jelly culture blown large. The stink was probably coming off it, and he studied it warily as the Worldmind scanned it. Probably some sort of weird inorganic construct.

The zero-light vision seemed confused for a moment, then the data started to scroll in. _Organic_ , Garthan thought, as the Worldmind fed data direct into his mind. A biomass scan was next, and Garthan waited patiently as the Worldmind matched it up to its existing databases. Whatever it was, Garthan had never seen the likes of it before. And if it had been somehow smuggled off Knowhere, he doubted that the Worldmind would have a correlating file.

He was wrong there too.

 _DNA Match: Xandarian Male, Hosen Reeth. DNA Match: Xandarian Male, Eaar Mosan. DNA Match, Xandarian Female, Reanna Lath-_

The names went on, filling Garthan's mind with a numbing amount of data, and it wasn't until he caught a fragment of it all that it slowly began to make sense. 

_DNA Match: Xandarian Male, Hazan Razorback-_

_This thing is made of people_? he queried the Worldmind incredulously. Horrified. 

"Stand by," the Worldmind said to him. Its voice was brisk. "Do not approach the unidentified object."

 _Toxicology's clean and it looks inert. No heat signature._ Garthan responded. _I can do a quick sweep all around._

There was another pause, then, "One sweep. Take precautions." 

Garthan nodded, and his hands both began to warm up. At a gesture, the Nova Force would pulse out beams if he wanted it, good to slice through even that blast door out the back. He took another step forward, and the cube thing _shrieked_. 

Instinctively, Garthan clapped his hands over his ears, but it took him a disoriented moment to realize that the scream had been psionic. Even as he staggered back, shapes suddenly elongated from the cube, like a child's clay approximation of hands, stubby fingers glutinous and jelly like. He dodged the first grab sharply, firing off a pulse from his hands that severed the gelatinous hand, but then the stump swivelled to face him, and shot out a jet of gray matter that caught him high on the chestplate even as Garthan darted silently to his right - or it would have, if the fluid hadn't splashed off the force field.

The stealth array wasn't working. Great. 

Garthan pinged his suit, turning it fully defensive. His armour locked down completely, becoming a full-body enviro suit, and even as he fired off another round, the Worldmind said, in its flat, calm tone, "Abort mission, Acting-Denarian Saal. Retreat." 

Relieved, Garthan started to head for the exit, firing as he went, but then two ropy tendrils shot out from the cube, catching him off balance. Even as he fired and severed them, more caught hold, reeling him in, regrowing more tendrils even as he fired. The severed stump swivelled over him directly, ignoring the blasts fired through the cube, then even as Garthan was about to instruct the force field to turn incendiary, it abruptly flickered and went out. 

He had just enough time to feel surprised as the tendrils went for his visor, unyielding and rubbery under his grip, trying to tug it off, searching for a grip; Garthan imagined, for one lurching, sickening moment, getting pulled _into_ the cube. Fear shot through him, cold, then hot, all blind animal panic as he clawed at the tendrils and tried to struggle free, shouting and yelling into his visor - then Peter was screaming, "Hey you ugly motherfucker, _look over here!_ " 

There was a sudden, sharp sensation of insane heat, hot and close enough that his visor pinged him a fussy, precise warning and advised him to retreat.

Then the cube screamed again as it caught fire, all at once, in an intense blue conflagration with a white core that hurt to look at. Garthan scrabbled and rolled away, trying to get clear, his mind ringing in agony from the creature's dying psionic shriek, and hands grabbed him under his arms and dragged him back further, until Garthan and Peter were at the door, both breathing hard, watching as the cube writhed and twisted and then burned into a dark, smoky stain. Small gobbets of fire still spat and glowed in embers on the ground, even when it was gone.

"What the fuck," Peter said softly, "Was that?"

"No idea." Garthan slumped back against the doorframe, heart still hammering wildly. Peter was almost unrecognisable, dressed in a bulky, bright blue enviro suit - probably belonging to the techs that serviced the recycling plant. At his feet was a Kree Flametongue, military make, probably grabbed from the armoury and illegal to possess and/or use in the Xandarian empire, but Garthan was still too painfully, breathlessly relieved to make a comment. 

"Well, whatever it was," Peter said dubiously, "I think it's dead." 

"Outstanding. Good choice of weapon." 

"Eh," Peter looked down at the sleek, fish-like black finish of the Flametongue. "I just hauled up the most bad-ass weapon I could carry and hoped for the best." 

Garthan nodded, still trying to slow his breathing. He tried to ping the Worldmind, then sat up sharply, startling Peter into jerking back. "The Worldmind." 

"What? What about it?"

"I can't feel its presence." 

"I tipped off the cavalry. They'll be here soon." 

"Cavalry?"

"Your other Nova Corps friends." Peter paused. "Unless this outage is everywhere." 

A fresh wave of panic purged him quickly of any relief that he had originally felt. Garthan got up, his suit already auto-sanitising itself as he rose to his feet, and started to stagger out of the room, then came to a stop as he felt the Worldmind's presence fade back into his mind. He tried to ping it, but there was no response, not even an impression. Frowning, Garthan held up a hand, and the force field popped back into place until he dismissed it with another thought.

"Back online?" Peter asked.

"It seems so."

"Has it ever shorted out like that before?"

"Never." Garthan said quietly, troubled. 

"Okay." Peter hesitated. "Mind if I take a look around since I'm here?" 

"Help yourself." Garthan patched himself into the Nova Corps gen log and uploaded preliminary thought-impressions to the incoming response team.

He was winding down from the initial debrief by the time Peter came out of the office, tossing the little desk grav cradle between his heavily gloved hands. "I think this was it."

"A grav cradle?"

"No, it was _in_ the grav cradle. It's gone like the rest though." Peter sighed loudly. "What a wasted trip."

"What was Yondu looking for?" 

"I guess there's no harm telling you now," Peter grumbled. "It was a star map." 

"A star map? To what? Or to where?"

"I don't know. All I know is that he said it would lead to the biggest score of his career." 

"The Razorbacks only collect star maps to First Races planets." 

"Yeah. He tried to trade this one off them before, but they reneged on the deal. Said they had better buyers. He killed the ambush team but didn't manage to get what he wanted. Then you guys turned up the heat and he had to get offworld. Gave it up as a bad job."

"The items that hung on the plaques were moved recently."

"Yeah. I think the stuff in that office is private collection only." Peter tossed the grav cradle over his shoulder, and it made a rattling sound as it hit the wall. "I think it got moved out last, or the room would be empty, like the room near the armoury. Why keep empty plaques and plinths up? Maybe it was only moved yesterday, even."

"The Worldmind has the treasury manifests and the computer data. It'll find out." 

"The same Worldmind that bugged out on you in there?" When Garthan said nothing, Peter added, "Maybe you could give me a copy of those files."

"They'll be classified."

"I'm thinking you really need an outside consultant on this problem, seeing as your brain computer is crapping itself. Just a thought. What am I going to do with that info? Sell it? It isn't worth shit to anyone but me." 

Garthan hesitated for a moment, then he brought up the files on his wrist access. They weren't marked classified - not yet, perhaps. He hesitated a moment longer, then he pinged them to Peter, grudgingly. 

"Thanks," Peter acknowledged. "Now I'm gonna get out of here." 

Garthan blinked. "You're going back to the Ravagers?"

"Hell no. I'm still empty handed, right? Hopefully the star map hasn't gone too far. I'm going to do some light reading while your friends barge around here and stir shit up. I'll catch you later." 

"Where?"

Peter laughed. "I'll just break into your place again, if you don't mind. Don't work too late, Officer. Can I take the cab? I promise I won't crash it into anything."

Garthan nodded wearily, suddenly too tired to argue, and watched as Peter started to amble off, still clunky in his enviro suit. He got as far as the armoury door before Garthan's tired brain kicked itself. "Quill."

Peter half-turned. "Yeah?"

"Thank you. For watching my back." 

Peter froze for a moment, then he laughed again. "Call me 'Peter', man."


	7. Chapter 7

I.

Garthan had assumed that he would be hauled in immediately for a debrief, but instead, once the Razorback base was secured, he was sent home to rest. He found Peter sitting at the narrow dining table, guiltily hunched over a meal card dinner of refried beans, vat-grown rice and reconstituted protein steaks, shrugged, and headed for the cleanser.

Dressing in civvies felt wrong, with his nerves still so highly strung after his encounter in the Razorback base, but Garthan was used to the comedown from a case, and settled in for his own dinner, forcing himself to eat even though he had no appetite. Peter had gone back to scanning through the Razorbacks' manifests, and he looked up when Garthan settled down. He had blown his wrist's holofeed larger, hovering it over the table, and the orange light from the code seemed to frame his awkward smile like a weird timestamp. 

"Sorry. I helped myself. I didn't think that you would be back so early, or I would've waited. I thought you'd have to go back to base and talk to your bosses." 

"Everything I went through in the Razorback base was uploaded. They're probably going through it now."

"You sound worried." 

Garthan shrugged. "It's too early to jump to conclusions." 

"But...?"

"But nothing. It's too early." He ate a spoonful of the bland rice, then added, "But it would be useful to have a greater insight on the kraka drug." 

Peter pulled a face at him. "I'm not calling Yondu, OK?"

"It's not an admission of defeat." 

"Well," Peter scowled, "If I called Yondu, and brought up the kraka drug, he'll come right over and grab me. He won't give a damn that there's outstanding Nova Corps warrants for his arrest. Then I'll be in deep shit _and_ have nothing to show him _and_ you guys will be caught up in some sort of mini intergalactic war with us." 

"He takes the safety of his men that seriously?"

"Well yeah," Peter said dryly. "That's Yondu for you. Tyrant, high functioning psychopath, den mother. How many Ravagers are doing serious time in galactic prisons? _Zero_. You should check." 

"Maybe if you called someone else on the Ravager crew?"

"They'll snitch on me. It's not worth siding against Yondu on crew matters. He'd see it as mutiny. Besides," Peter added, "I don't think Yondu's really into understanding how shit works. All he really wants to know about things is whether they can be sold or whether they can be destroyed. I bet all he knows about kraka is that it's contagious, not worth selling, and it's flammable." 

"Flammable?"

"Yeah. The Ravagers who came back said that the containment perimeter was enforced with flamethrowers. You know who you should ask? The Worldmind. I bet it knows way more than what it told you. I bet it doesn't usually freak out over drug busts or epidemics."

"If the information is above my clearance level-"

"If _you_ were worried about that you wouldn't press me to talk to Yondu," Peter countered. "I think you're worried about the sudden Nova Force outage."

"Thankfully that's a matter for the Nova Prime to solve, not me." Garthan ate the rest of his dinner in peace, and as he was clearing the bowls, asked, "Find anything in the manifests?"

"Yup. They tried to put in a few false leads, but I've seen shit like that before. _We_ do stuff like that all the time. They've been routing stuff through a gas hauler that was bound for Aryal, using a shell company that Hazan controlled through an intermediary."

"You found that through the public port records?" Garthan asked, impressed.

Peter squirmed for a moment, then he muttered, "Well, not really."

"Not really?"

"I might have maybe hacked your access key. In the name of the greater good. I used to hack the _Eclector's_ onboard systems for fun. Your security's not great. In comparison. Sorry."

Garthan sighed. He should have known. "Why Aryal? Aryal's little more than a asteroid station. It's a mining base. And why would they need a gas hauler? They're sitting on a lot of natural deposits of their own." 

"The hauler was _exporting_ natural deposits. It would go to Aryal to pick up its usual load, deliver it to other stations, then hop back to Xandar. That bit of the business looks legit. Good money, too. The only funny thing is that whenever it arrived on Aryal, port sec noted that it was always about a tonne and a half lighter than it should've been. What weighs about a tonne and a half?"

Garthan thought for a moment. "Small escape pod with basic self-propulsion, probably." 

"Yep."

"No one ever _noticed_?"

"Well," Peter said comfortingly, "Shit gets jettisoned into space all the time. Besides, a lot of ships legitimately have a tonnage difference coming and going, like planetary surveyors. And Xandarian port controls are pretty lax. Except for weaponry. No offense." 

Garthan nodded wearily. The relaxed Xandarian offworlder policy was a continuous pain in the ass, in his opinion. "Where did the pod go?" 

"I looked a little deeper in the records. The life pod can't go too far. So the last time the hauler made the trip, a week or so later, the _Shymr_ landed in Kryn, around a tonne and a quarter heavier. That was about five days ago." 

"The _Shymr_? Sounds like a Kree refugee ship." 

"Yeah. Supposedly. Any reason why a Kree refugee ship would get _heavier_ rather than lighter? Normally refugee ships are packed high to the brim for space, right? Full of the desperate?" Peter rolled his eyes. "Amateurs. I thought this was meant to be some sort of mid-tier smuggling outfit. I would have put the pod on a surveyor ship, maybe fitted with a jammer so that it'll show up empty if scanned. No one would have thought twice about something like that flying in heavier."

"I don't think that they're used to smuggling _out_ items from Xandar. They use the Broker to sell. They're probably far better at smuggling _in_ items," Garthan said, though he frowned a little. "How new is this shell company?"

Peter checked. "Huh. Nearly a cycle and a half old exactly." 

"Around when they stopped dealing with First Races artefacts."

"Around when _everyone_ stopped, I bet. 'Sides, smuggling shit in, smuggling shit out, often it's the same principle, just reversed. It's just a matter of lateral thinking. And I bet that some of their 'found' First Races artefacts probably came from stealing from existing collections on other worlds. Unless," Peter added mildly, "The Razorbacks weren't really the ones that sent anything to Kryn. Maybe it was whoever infected the Razorbacks in the first place. Their new management." 

Garthan felt himself grow suddenly cold. If the Kree were behind this, then the situation was far more dire than he had originally thought. He closed his eyes, pinging the Worldmind, but it was unresponsive. So he uploaded his impressions to the log, instead, feeling a little helpless about it. 

The answer was nearly immediate. "Acting-Denarian Garthan Saal," Nova Prime said into his ear. "Report to my office. With your guest. Now, if you please." 

Peter raised an eyebrow at Garthan when Garthan looked to him. "What?"

"Get up. We're going to talk to Nova Prime."

II.

The current Nova Prime was male, Xandarian born and bred. Adaal Mandar had been a Nova Centurion for thirty years before his predecessor had been murdered by a Kree assassin, and his rise to the top had been predictable. He was rake-thin, his hair silver before its time, and he looked pale and tired under the white Nova Prime uniform. He had been in the midst of briskly arranging slews of datasets over the holovid console that took up most of the space in his otherwise empty office: most of the time, Adaal preferred to hold court in the main Core datafeed chamber.

Adaal's glance dropped briefly to Peter's hip, and Garthan realized belatedly that he had forgotten to take back his obviously Corps-issued blaster. He stiffened, embarrassed, but thankfully Adaal seemed to let it slide, folding his long-fingered hands behind his back. "You suspect that this incident is of Kree origin?"

In the corner of his eyes, Garthan could see Peter flinch slightly, and he was careful to keep his expression blank. Adaal Mandar was notorious for being brutally frank. "It's a possibility."

"Or it could be a third party. Or the Razorbacks."

"Then it would make more sense to use a survey ship than a refugee ship." 

Adaal grunted. "Other than a weapons scan, we don't check the refugee ships too thoroughly. While we run spot checks on the rest." 

"But you guys are at _war_ with the Kree," Peter said, surprised. "You have been, for centuries. Wouldn't you check anything that's _incoming_ from the Kree empire?"

Adaal transferred his cool, penetrating stare to Peter, and to Garthan's amusement, Peter actually shuffled a little closer. "The war used to be fought out in space, with ships. Until a few cycles ago, when a new, highly fanatical faction of the so-called 'pure' Kree rose in power and started escalating." 

"Hylaraan," Garthan said, and Adaal nodded.

"What happened in Hylaraan?" Peter asked.

"It was a survey station. Manned with three thousand Xandarians, dug into a small moon. The Kree attacked it."

"They nuked it?"

Adaal glanced briefly at the data feeds. "If you drop large rocks down a gravity well, it'll work just as well as a warhead. The station ceased to exist, so the Worldmind also chose to escalate. After that, we started to accept Kree refugees on a far greater scale than we were before." 

"Doesn't sound logical."

"The pink-skinned Kree are seen as a... subrace, in their homeworld. Even though they are the majority. As the wars wore on, their living conditions often became... difficult. The pure Kree raised funds for their fleets by heavily taxing the 'non-pure'. They also made it illegal for any Kree to breed with non-Kree. Many of the pink-skinned Kree, particularly those on their outer trade worlds, had already mingled with offworlders. When the pogroms began, most of them with mixed families fled here." 

"Probably should have fled to Asgard, or the Sh'iar."

"Neither of those empires are kindly inclined towards the Kree." 

"But you guys are?" 

Adaal arched a slim eyebrow. "The Xandarian Empire is the least homogenous intergalactic empire in the 'verse. There are no species limitations, social or otherwise. We have had non-Xandarian Nova Primes, for example. It is the best place in the 'verse to raise a mixed family, with no fear of facing scorn or prejudice. We invite and encourage offworlder contact."

"But now maybe one of those Kree refugee ships has been bringing in God knows what into one of your Core worlds," Peter said mildly, and Adaal sighed. 

"Yes. Tensions are high on Kryn. The refugee processing centre is there, as is the main housing initiative. It has the highest percentage of Kree refugees of all our Core worlds. If we enforce a shutdown, ship checks and a door-to-door inquiry of the Kree refugees, there may be riots." 

"Even just the Kree refugees from the _Shymr_?" 

"The situation is quite delicate, especially in the escalating war," Adaal said wearily. "All our Centurions are engaged in controlling hostilities in the empire's perimeter. And many of our Denarians. It is my hope that... whatever this strange matter is... it can be resolved without having to escalate matters within our own territory."

"The Worldmind could investigate the crew manifests and see which of the Kree refugees are legitimate and which are not." 

"It could," Adaal said, and something in his tone made Garthan frown.

"Is something... wrong with the Worldmind?"

"Not wrong, no." Adaal said pensively. "But not entirely right, either. It is thinking about something. It is... concerned." 

"My link to the Nova Force deactivated briefly during the encounter."

"Yes. I am aware of that. It is most troubling."

"So you don't know why that happened either," Peter supplied. "Outstanding." 

Garthan glowered at Peter, but Adaal said, "Yes, we are unsure. And the Worldmind is not being forthcoming. What I propose is this. Go to Kryn. Investigate the matter of the _Shymr_ and its last consignment, and any similar refugee ships. By all means make contact with the Kryn Core precinct, but be very... sensitive. The Kree refugee rehousing system in Kryn is very delicate. Everyone's on war rations. And there have been tensions."

"Dropping a rock down a gravity well probably didn't make them any friends," Peter quipped, and Adaal winced.

"The Kree on Kryn are refugees. Most of them. Hopefully all of them. Treat them with care and respect."

"Understood," Garthan nodded.

"As to Peter Quill," Adaal sighed heavily. "The item you were looking for, if I understand, may be long lost. The Nova Corps is prepared to compensate you for your time to date-"

"I think the 'item' is probably in Kryn," Peter cut in. "Or it will be. I think their last consignment probably left sometime yesterday or today, after you guys waded into the recycling plant. I think that a pod from some hauler is probably going to make contact with another refugee ship soon, which will probably end up in Kryn over the next few weeks. Or longer. Refugee ships are civ freight. They're pretty slow." 

Adaal nodded slowly. "So you wish to accompany Saal to Kryn."

"Too dangerous," Garthan disagreed, but Peter ignored him.

"Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, I haven't seen my end of the deal, and it's going to Kryn. Hopefully."

"Very well," Adaal nodded again. "Perhaps we could arrange some sort of transport for you over a connecting freight while Saal takes a starblaster. Your assistance has been notable to date."

"Starblasters are slow too. No offense." Peter grinned. "I know a better ship. And it's sitting right in your impound hangar."

III.

Impound services cleaned up the Ravager ship by the time Garthan and Peter got there, and he spent his time doing an onboard check of the flight deck systems while Peter ran up and down the ship in excitement.

The systems were fine, but the onboard controls were locked with some sort of complex algorithmic security that Garthan had never seen before, which was probably why the M-class ship had actually stayed long enough in the port to be impounded. There had been welding damage to the hull that had been patched up by Impound services - somebody had broken in to the ship when it had been abandoned and had failed to start it up. 

He pinged the Worldmind for an unlock, and as it sorted obligingly through the security, Peter spilled back into the flight deck, flushed and gorgeous and grinning with sheer pleasure. "This old girl is _beautiful_. She's the most beautiful ship I've seen." 

Garthan had been on luxury pinnacles and lavish starships of all make and sizes, particularly during his early years in Vice, but he nodded. There was something attractively predatory about the M-class ship: it was sleek and built with efficient, graceful economy. Peter settled into the pilot's seat, and Garthan said, dryly, "Can you fly?"

"I've done simulations." Peter strapped himself in, his jaw setting defiantly.

"Not the same." Garthan paused. "How did you get off the _Eclector_?"

"Stowed away in a Warbird that was doing a supply run." 

Garthan sighed, even as the Worldmind unravelled the security, and the onboard console lit up all at once. A computerised voice said, in allspeak-registered Zatoan, "Welcome, Yondu Udonta." 

On an impulse, Garthan pinged the Worldmind again, and after a moment, the onboard ship computer said, "Reset override accepted. Captain's voice print requested." 

Garthan raised his eyebrows at Peter, who stared at him for a long moment before realization dawned, then the boy flushed with pleasure all over again. "Peter Quill." 

"Welcome, Peter Quill," the ship said, this time in Xandarian, which was probably close enough. "Do you wish to name the ship?"

Peter hesitated for a long moment, his eyes darting back and forth. "The Milano." 

"Captain's override accepted. Welcome aboard the Milano, Captain Quill." 

Peter was grinning from ear to ear. "Ship, what's your status?" 

"Hull integrity at a hundred-per-cent. Shields fully charged. SRC-jammer pulsars fully charged. Fuel at a hundred-per-cent. Life support fully operational. Systems green." 

Garthan strapped himself into the co-pilot's seat, and when Peter hesitated again, he said, "Well? Take us up." 

"I thought you didn't trust me to fly."

"Everyone's got to learn sometime." Garthan didn't mention the co-pilot's override, but Peter grinned at him again and set his hands on the flightstick. Garthan felt the sudden acceleration as the ship rose into the air, away from the rest of the impounded ships, further, Peter frowning in concentration as he completed exit manoeuvres out of the vertical column. 

Garthan let out the breath he was holding as Peter took the ship sedately up past the airstream, angling it up, until the Core Precinct grew smaller and smaller under them, until it was a silvery blot on the face of a silvery green planet. If he had been in a starblaster, or any ship without a stardrive, this was the point where the ship would initiate full acceleration, to thrust it out of Xandar's gravity well, crushing Garthan into the co-pilot's couch. 

But all he felt when the stardrive kicked in was a vague sense of lightness as artificial grav kicked in, then it felt as though time accelerated all around them, as the silvery blot became a dot, and Xandar itself receded beneath sharply, away from filling his entire vision and down, becoming a spherical horizon against the vastness of space. 

Beside him, Peter let out a loud whoop of fierce joy, and Garthan smiled despite himself. "Do you know how to set course to Kryn?"

"'Course." Peter looked confused as Garthan unstrapped himself and got up, a little shaky in the new grav for a moment before he compensated. Most older stardrives didn't have the juice for grav, making space flight a mostly zero-grav endeavour, but Garthan was unsurprised that the Ravagers were up to date. "Aren't you going to stay and supervise?"

"I need to sleep. Don't crash into anything." 

Peter pulled a face at him for a moment before turning back greedily to his onboard feed, and Garthan headed down to the crew deck. Although the transit from Xandar to Kryn was a popular one, space was damned big. Peter would only be able to crash into something if he actually tried, especially if it was another ship, and debris were cleared regularly by scheduled cleanups. The ship should be safe enough, even if Peter wanted to play with the manual piloting instead of plotting a course and passing control to the ship. 

Kryn was on the other side of the Xandarian empire, a two week trip even on a fast ship with a stardrive. Garthan planned to spend it carefully studying port records and Corps reports on the refugee situation, and listened to a local newscast as he used the aerosonic shower in the crew deck.

Distracted by the newscast as it discussed aid shipments from Ysaros, Garthan nearly missed Peter's approach as he sat on a randomly chosen bunk, tunic still in his hands, dressed only in civvie breeches, until Peter walked right into his line of sight. 

"Problem?" Garthan asked, which was as far as he got before Peter grinned and climbed boldly onto his lap, and kissed him hard on the mouth.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I might as well just get on with the program and reward anyone who had been waiting for the m/m. lol. Regular readers would probably note that my fics don't actually usually have much m/m. ^^;; So don't expect too much of the rest~

I.

The newscast droned on for another ten seconds as Garthan froze up in utter shock. Peter's kiss was enthusiastic but unpracticed, more teeth than tenderness, and he was heavy and warm, straddling Garthan on the bunk, gangly knees to either side on the orange padding.

When Peter pressed a curious lick against Garthan's mouth, he clamped his lips shut, dropping his hands back down to the bunk, and forced himself to wait until Peter gave it up and leaned back, hands curled over Garthan's bared shoulders, frowning, almost pouting. He was _gorgeous_ , and this close, Garthan couldn't help the shaky breath that eased out him.

Peter's frown faded when he heard it, and the boy grinned again, mischievously, and gestured to shut off the newscast. "Get with the program." 

"How about you get off me?"

"Hmm," Peter made a show of thinking about it. "How about not."

"Bored with the ship already?"

"Nope. But I didn't want my first passenger to feel neglected by the in-flight service." 

Garthan sighed. "I need to sleep, Quill."

"From you, it should be Pe- _ter_ ," Peter corrected, and shifted closer, until he was pressed right up against Garthan's definitely interested cock. It took all of Garthan's self control not to groan and grind against Peter, and his hands curled a little on the bunk.

"You don't need to feel obliged about the ship."

"I'm not. I was gonna steal it anyway, once I found what I was looking for," Peter admitted. "This is about something else."

"What?"

"You're hot, I'm horny, and we're two weeks out to Kryn?" Peter grinned again, and Garthan sighed. "We should christen the ship everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Gravity is optional."

Worldmind, but Garthan was tempted. "This isn't because of an obligation?"

Peter rolled his eyes. "Officer, I lived seven years with the Ravagers. I have an overdeveloped sense of self-entitlement. Comes with the upbringing. If you're wondering whether I feel guilty about breaking into your place and eating on your dime, the answer is 'no'."

"You should get another job," Garthan muttered, though he tentatively moved his hands up to Peter's knees. This time, when Peter kissed him, he got a hand up behind Peter's skull, tangling his fingers into the thick curls, and gentled it. Peter let him take control, stifling a moan against Garthan's mouth and running his own hands greedily over the sharp lines of muscle on Garthan's shoulders and arms.

Peter was breathlessly dazed when Garthan let up to study him, and his arousal was a painful-looking tent in his breeches. "First kiss?" Garthan asked, and Peter blushed hotly. 

"Does it matter?"

"I really shouldn't be doing this," Garthan said, though he found that his hands had moved all the way up to Peter's waist, as though magnetised. "Are you even legal?"

"What's the Xandarian age of consent?"

"Depends on the species. Earthers aren't in the system."

Peter rolled his eyes. "You guys live maybe a hundred years? Cycles?"

"Give or take."

"OK, we're the same. Give or take." 

"Sixteen cycles," Garthan allowed then. "That's the legal age."

"I'm over that, OK?" Peter scowled at him, but disheveled as he was, it was only adorable. "Have _you_ ever been laid before?"

"Obviously. Don't be ridiculous."

"Count me shocked," Peter said tartly, which was why Garthan had to tug him over for another kiss, until Peter was purring against him, pulled flush, pliant. Earthers seemed to have a higher body temperature than Xandarians, and under his tunic, Peter's skin had the healthy, golden glow of youth, flawless over lean muscle. 

Peter's tunic quickly joined Garthan's, discarded on the deck, and he gasped as Garthan chased the pulse in his neck, mouthing over the sensitive skin and making Peter squirm. Body temperature wasn't the only difference. Peter's skin had an alien scent to it, warm and musky and almost animal, and he was covered in very fine, small hairs, the same colour as those on his head. There was no discernible taste to his skin, as Garthan licked a stripe up Peter's collarbone to his jaw, but he got a whine and a buck against his thigh, so he did it again, then again until Peter tugged him up for a breathless kiss.

"Are we allergic to each other? Shouldn't we check?" Peter asked, his voice husky now, his hips rolling and rubbing against Garthan, the fabric of their breeches growing confining, nearly irritating.

"Little late for that," Garthan noted, and nipped at Peter's lower lip. "I'm not getting a toxicology warning from the Nova Force. From either of us." 

"Good," Peter grinned, pleased, and rubbed the palm of his hand up the tent in Garthan's breeches, getting a jerk and a curse. "Because I'm pretty sure that I'll want this inside me. And I don't want to mess around with a microfilm."

Garthan had to take in a slow breath, and let it out just as slowly, but just as he was fairly sure that he had his control back, Peter kissed him again, hungry this time, demanding, and there was no more finessing. Peter's grav boots hit the deck next, with heavy clunks, then his hip holster, then it was a messy tangle of belts and breeches, Garthan's back pressed up against the warm, humming hull of the starship and Peter with his mouth pressed to Garthan's neck, imitating what Garthan had done before and better. Peter was a fast learner, and an apt one, though he didn't seem sure of what to do with his hands.

He spat in his right palm and slipped it between them both, ignoring his own straining cock and grasping Peter's, clenching his fingers into a fist at the base and tugging up, slow and firm. The reaction was better than he hoped: Peter whimpered and dug his nails into Garthan's arms and snapped his hips up against Garthan's hand. 

Xandarians and Earthers had something in common, then. If barely. Where his own cock was thicker at the base, and tapered up, with a ridged underside, Peter's was mostly smooth, with a thick, reddened cap, and a thick vein that got Peter wriggling and moaning when Garthan traced it with a thumb, up to the cap, then he pressed the pad of his thumb against the wet slit at the top and Peter went _wild_. Hands shoved him back hard against the hull as Peter crushed their lips together, bucking against his lap, and the friction was _fantastic_ , better when Garthan got his fingers around them both, stroking hard. 

Peter came with a shout that he buried against Garthan's neck, all thick white fluid. It took everything he had not to drop off the edge as well, wary of his Force-enhanced strength, clenching his hands tightly on the bunk as he steadied himself. The wounded, shocked little breathy sounds that Peter was making against Garthan's ear weren't helping, and Garthan had to end up staring at the ceiling, teeth clenched, thinking wildly over casework. 

"Your turn," Peter whispered into his ear, and Garthan bit out a groan.

"You want me inside you?" Peter shivered, and let out a shaky gasp, which sounded like a _yes_. "Use your mouth, then," Garthan said, then cautiously added, "No pressure." 

Peter reared back, rolling his eyes, and looked around for a moment before getting off the bunk and kneeling naked on the deck, shooting Garthan a playfully winsome look, then grinning as Garthan had to take a few breaths and clench a hand over the base of his cock. He shifted to the edge of the bunk, and Peter scooted closer, studying Garthan curiously as he pressed a kiss against an inner thigh. 

"You guys don't have balls. Testicles," Peter clarified, not that the allspeak needed it.

"Not externally." Garthan stroked his clean hand over Peter's curls, impatient for him to begin, but not wanting to rush him. He knew Peter wouldn't have done something like this before. "External ones don't make any evolutionary sense to me. You Earthers are weird." 

"Shut up," Peter grinned at him, and leaned up, kissing the soft, highly sensitive patch of skin under his cock, between his thighs, and Garthan twitched and bit out another, raw moan when he felt a wet tongue press against him. "Your body temp's lower. Maybe that's why." 

"Is it strange?"

"I don't really have a bar to judge 'strange' by." Peter tried a tentative lick, from the base to the first ridge, then, encouraged by the strangled sound that Garthan made, he balanced his arms against the edge of the bunk, flush beside Garthan's thighs, and licked higher, brow furrowed in earnest concentration. Worldmind, but Peter was _beautiful_ , the pink press of his tongue licking up to the tapered tip then lapping curiously at the slit as his blaster-callused gun hand got a grip on the rest of Garthan's cock and stroked. 

"No foreskin either," Peter murmured, as Garthan cursed and bucked into his grip. 

"I don't see the... _ahh_... evolutionary reason behind something like that either," Garthan managed to gasp out, as allspeak translated. 

"I'm pretty sure that pillow talk isn't normally meant to be insulting," Peter replied dryly, then he fit the tip of Garthan's cock into his mouth and dipped his head, swallowing what he could. The higher body temperature made the tight, wet press of heat around him exquisite; Garthan slumped back against the hull, breath hissing between his teeth, fingers clenched on the edge of the bunk, watching dazedly as Peter awkwardly made a clenched fist at the base of Garthan's cock and sucked lightly.

Shakily, he reached over, gently circling Peter's hand with his, encouraging him to squeeze tight at the base then stroke upwards, or rub and play with the ridges, and again, Peter was a quick study, even muffling groans around Garthan's flesh as he obeyed. In no time at all, Garthan was pushing urgently at Peter's shoulders, gasping, " _Peter_ ," but Peter didn't draw back - he didn't know to - and Garthan ended up spilling with a loud moan in Peter's mouth. 

Peter jerked back in surprise, sputtering and gasping, but then he grinned and watched Garthan for a long moment, hands braced on Garthan's hips, then very deliberately, he wiped his chin against the back of his hand and licked the smear clean. Garthan pushed his fist into his mouth, just in time to stifle a whimper, but Peter didn't seem to notice, rearing up to lick up the rest of the semen spilled on Garthan's belly, then he laughed as enough brain function returned for Garthan to drag him back up onto his lap.

"Mine tastes weird. Yours doesn't really taste of anything," Peter noted, and laughed again as Garthan growled and kissed him, licking into Peter's mouth. Something did taste salty, faintly bitter, even, but Garthan didn't let up until Peter pulled away for breath, then Peter was chuckling again and gasping as Garthan licked his jaw and neck clean. 

"You dented the bunk," Peter said, a little sleepily, as he curled up and tucked his cheek on Garthan's shoulder. "That's property damage." 

Garthan nodded absently, twisting until they were both curled on the bunk, Peter dragging his arm over his waist. "Still not used to Denarian-level access."

"Hot," Peter noted, running his fingers over one set of five finger-dents on the edge of the bunk, but he grinned and yawned when Garthan rolled his eyes. "Maybe after we take this nap you could put me through the bunk."

Allspeak struggled a little with the translation, and as Garthan tried to untangle Earther slang, Peter added, dryly, "Meaning, yes, I do want you to fuck me, Officer."

Maybe Earther males had a...? Garthan pressed his fingers between Peter's legs, ignoring the chuckle and the squirm, but there was nothing between the external (strange) balls and the sphincter muscle. Peter started to laugh, and Garthan raised an eyebrow at him.

"Up here," Peter said, grabbing Garthan's fingers and pressing his middle and index finger against the sphincter. What. Seeing Garthan's confusion, Peter tilted his head, then he grinned again. "Let me guess. Xandarians don't have a prostate gland?"

"Different internal location," Garthan said, fascinated now, as he felt the ring of muscle twitch against his fingers. "You mean you can fit a..." He trailed off for a moment, trying to imagine it, but his brain kept having to fight battles with his libido. "Xandarian body mass isn't as elastic," he said finally. 

"How do your females give birth, then?"

"Their wombs have a special cellular structure and a hinged-"

"Actually I don't want to know," Peter cut in hastily, pulling a face. "Wow. Okay. Well. Humans are pretty 'elastic'. Earthers," he clarified. "Just needs a bit of work. It'll feel good. For the both of us."

"I thought you haven't done this before." 

"Not with someone else," Peter said, and blushed again, then grinned as Garthan let out a harsh breath and dragged him close for a kiss.

II.

A day into the jump, Garthan took to wearing civvies around the Milano instead of his Nova Corps gear, if only because Peter had bitched and begged until it was just easier to give in. Something about how Garthan looked 'way better'. Garthan couldn't tell. He was sitting at the starship's main command holofeed, studying the Kryn Core precinct's detailed files on the current situation in Kryn, when the holofeed abruptly flickered, notifying him of an unknown incoming call. Curious, Garthan answered, and the holofeed changed, to show the interior of what looked like another starship, and the scowling, blue-skinned visage of a Zatoan dressed in Ravager maroon leathers.

"Yondu Udonta," Garthan said slowly, and glanced briefly at the ladder up to the flight deck. Peter was up in the pilot's seat, as far as he knew. 

"Who the fuck are you?" Yondu scowled. "Why the hell are you on my ship? Where's Peter?" 

"In the pilot's chair."

" _What_. Can he even fly?" Yondu turned his head for a moment, as though listening to something offscreen, then, "OK, so he can fly sims. But it's not the same!"

"I agree. But he's doing well so far." 

"All right, asshole," Yondu growled, then he hesitated, staring at something on Garthan's neck. Garthan tensed for a moment, then he remembered - Peter had been _very_ enthusiastic with his teeth, only an hour ago, and had left a reddening mark, visible high over the collar of the tunic. Yondu pinched at the bridge of his nose, even as Garthan struggled to keep his expression blank. "Go and fetch Peter."

"Why?"

"I don't need to explain 'why' to a bed-warmer."

Garthan raised an eyebrow, then he shrugged and pushed away from the panel, striding over to the ladder and hauling himself up a few rungs. "Peter, Yondu wants to speak to you."

There was a horrified yelp from above. Garthan waited for a moment longer, then he dropped off the ladder and stood to a side, out of the line of sight of the holofeed. Eventually, Peter scrambled back down, looking sharply from Garthan to Yondu's holo projection, then he squared his shoulders, sighed, and walked into the holofeed's line of sight.

"Yondu, I can explain-"

"Yeah?" Yondu snarled, "You leaving the _Eclector_ without permission is desertion, boy! You're in a world of fucking trouble. And now you're on _my_ ship? Which you've put in _your_ name? You think I wouldn't notice? The ship's still logged into the _Eclector's_ systems!"

"Okay, firstly," Peter said hastily, "Your ship was impounded by the Nova Corps, OK? Has been for cycles. It's free game. Finders keepers, right? I had to use it to get offworld, OK?" 

"What the _hell_ were you doing tangling with the Nova Corps, boy? Haven't we taught you anything?"

"They're not so bad-"

"They've got no sense of humour at all about piracy, Quill! They'll lock you up in the Kyln and you'd only leave when you're dead! And so help me," Yondu growled, "If they catch you, I'm tempted to just let them have you." 

"Bit late there," Peter said innocently, with a grin over at Garthan, who rolled his eyes. 

Yondu's expression froze, for a long moment, then he glared offscreen, even as Garthan heard the sound of badly stifled laughter. "You're... _banging_ someone from the Nova Corps?" Yondu asked, incredulously. "Is that why you went to Xandar?"

"No! Oh my _God_ , Yondu."

"Was it that guy who answered the holofeed?" Yondu leaned closer to the feed, squinting, as though by doing so he would get a better line of sight. "What the _hell_." The offscreen laughter grew louder, and Yondu glared again. "Kraglin, fuck off. That's an order." The Zatoan then scowled back at the screen. "Is he treating you right? You can't trust the Nova Corps. I don't think they can find their assholes with their own hands. And he might have diseases." 

Peter, amusingly enough, actually flushed crimson. " _Yondu_! I went to Xandar because you said you wanted a star map from there, okay? Remember? The biggest score of your career?"

Yondu frowned, and leaned back against his seat. "You needed to bang one of the Nova Corps to get that?"

"No!" 

"Okay then," Yondu seemed to relax a little. "Where is it?"

"I'm still looking. Shit happened. The Razorbacks don't have it anymore." 

"Bullshit. Hazan wouldn't have let go of that star map unless someone prised it out of his cold, dead hands."

"That's pretty much what happened, I think." 

Yondu sobered, studying Peter for a long moment. "Is this about getting your own ship?" 

"Yeah," Peter said belligerently. "It is." 

"All right, fine," Yondu grunted. "Drop your Nova Corps squeeze off somewhere, preferably on an uninhabited planet, then come home. That's an order. The ship you're on is yours." 

"What," Peter blinked. "Just like that?"

"You got it out of their impound. I don't want to know how. Rules of the game. Just get the hell out of there while you still can," Yondu said flatly. "The Xandarian Empire ain't a good place to be right now, kid." 

"'Cos of the war? That's been going on for centuries!" 

"'Cos the Kree have gone fuckin' zurkshit crazy, that's why," Yondu growled. "Word on the vine is that they're gonna strike against the Xandarians soon. Somehow. Some new way, maybe. Most of us in the know are waiting to see how the dust settles."

"Strike? How?" 

"Don't know, don't fuckin' care. Are you coming home now or what?"

"Make me," Peter retorted, and shut off the holofeed.

"'Word on the vine'?" Garthan asked slowly.

"All the merc groups are gossipy as hell," Peter muttered. "It's a professional thing. So we don't get into each other's way. Unless we feel like it. Yondu probably heard something from someone who heard it from someone in a bar. Could be nothing." 

"Or?"

"Or it could be legit," Peter admitted reluctantly. "He's got a great instinct for trouble. And he was worried."

"We're only a day out from Xandar," Garthan said, thinking it over. "If you drop me back, I can take a starblaster to Kryn." 

"Why would I do that?"

"You have your ship. And you've just been recalled."

Peter shook his head. "I don't have the star map."

"It didn't sound like Yondu cared very much about that."

"When he said it was going to be the biggest score of his career, I don't think he was joking. He doesn't joke about things like that," Peter set his jaw. "That's still in Kryn, and I want it."


	9. Chapter 9

I.

Despite Peter's complaints and threats, Garthan was fairly sure that Earther bodies could not possibly be as pliable as Peter had claimed, and refused to use anything more than fingers for the first few days; one finger, then two.

Peter was so _tight_ that Garthan was afraid of accidentally hurting him, even using medi-gel as lubricant, but it did look like Earther bodies _had_ somehow been made with this as a possible source of pleasure. Xandarian bodies also had vestigal parts that were remnants of evolutionary changes, but at least they usually made _some_ sort of immediate biological sense. Not that Garthan was complaining. Whenever his fingers brushed up against the gland within Peter, Peter would make a little, gasping cry and try to screw himself down against Garthan's fingers. It was maddening. 

"I'm meant to be researching the Kryn situation," Garthan murmured into Peter's ear, as he rubbed a third finger against the stretching ring of muscle. He's pressed up against the hull again, Peter boneless in his lap: Garthan had already brought him off once with his mouth, messy and filthy and noisy. 

"Mmhmm," Peter moaned, cheek pressed over Garthan's shoulder and trying to spread his thighs wider against the bunk. 

"Are you listening?" Garthan asked, and tugged at the fleshy lobe of Peter's ear with his teeth.

"Uhh! Yeah. You're, uh, researching how to drive Earthers fucking insane," Peter groaned, "Except with actually _less_ fucking that I would have liked." 

Garthan hummed instead, by way of an answer, and carefully pressed in a third finger. Peter gasped, arching his back into it, greedy boy, but Garthan pinned him down by tightening the arm he had around Peter's waist, and pushed in his slicked fingers, slowly, listening to Peter's breathing for any sudden hitches of pain. Thank the Worldmind that the starship was equipped with an aerosonic cleanser in the crew deck. Getting Peter clean enough to do this might have been somewhat challenging otherwise-

His cock pulsed at the thought, and Garthan let out a shaky breath before he managed to get his fingers knuckle deep, waiting for Peter's body to adjust. "All right?"

Peter moaned, clutching at Garthan's shoulders. "Please tell me that you'll actually get around to really fucking me before we reach Kryn - _aah!_ "

Garthan paused, fingers still crooked. "Yes?"

"I'm more than _fucking fine_ , so _fuck_ me," Peter snarled, and Garthan shook his head slowly and continued his unhurried scissoring. Earthers also seemed to sweat a lot more than Garthan was used to: Peter's skin was slick with a sheen of it as he bit out a sob and tried to grind down.

"When you're ready."

"I swear I'm ready," Peter sucked in a harsh breath. "Please. Please give me more. I'm ready."

"Not yet."

Peter let out a gasping, garbled sound that was more sob than moan, but he ducked his head and trembled when Garthan crooked his fingers again, rubbing deep. He was getting much better at knowing exactly where and how to touch Peter. He heard another gasping sob, and a muttered, " _Asshole_ ," as Peter twisted urgently against him, then Garthan relented, pulling out his fingers, leaning down to kiss Peter as though they had all the time in the 'verse. 

It was Peter who started groping between them, Peter who pulled up with a low groan and, clumsy, still a little awkward, started to fit the tapered tip of Garthan's cock into him. Garthan left his hands on Peter's hips, shoving down the temptation to grip hard and just drag Peter down all the way to the hilt. The little, whimpering sounds that Peter was making weren't good for his self-control. Worldmind, sex had never been so good. 

The final inch took a lot of determined squirming and whining from Peter, but eventually Garthan was as deep as he could go and Peter's little whimpers had escalated into hitched, gasping cries that made the blood burn hot in Garthan's veins. Carefully, deliberately, he got his hands off Peter's hips, splaying them against the bunk instead, and Peter grinned at him, breathless and triumphant. 

"It's okay."

"Just in case." 

"You won't hurt me," Peter said confidently, and the muscles around Garthan rippled as Peter clenched down tentatively. Garthan twitched, with a gasp, and Peter yelped before smirking, so very smug. 

"How does it feel?" Garthan asked, when Peter didn't seem to be in a hurry to move. 

"Better than I thought it would."

"Does it hurt?"

"It's a good hurt," Peter conceded, and when Garthan started to frown, added, "Don't worry about it." Bracing himself against Garthan's shoulders, he twisted himself up, then ground back down, with a breathy, hungry sigh, eyes screwed shut. "Oh, oh fuck." 

" _Peter_."

"It's good," Peter said breathlessly, lifting up, then down again, a hot, clenching heat like a tight glove around Garthan's cock, and it was the most arousing thing Garthan had ever seen. "So _good_ ," Peter groaned, and raised himself higher. This time, he used the induced gravity and his weight to slam himself down, hard enough that Garthan let out a shout of pleasure punctuated by Peter's gasp.

It got messy after that: Peter bouncing on his lap, driving him against the hull with each messy, brutal shove, Garthan bracing himself against the bunk as he thrust up against Peter's desperate rhythm, Peter's hoarse whimpers and curses, his cock thickened again and trapped between them. Garthan tried to reach for it, but Peter shoved his hand back down, grinning as he shifted his weight until Garthan's next thrust shoved right up against the perfect spot inside Peter and made Peter scream. 

"Oh, oh fuck, harder," Peter gasped, and Garthan hissed, pushing away from the hull even as he rolled Peter under him onto the bunk, and he lifted Peter's hips by bracing an arm under the small of his back, his free hand digging into the padding beside Peter's shoulder, legs curling around Garthan's waist as he thrust as roughly into Peter as he dared, against a strangled, raw rhythm of, " _Fuck_ , fuck, fuck, _please_ , harder, fuck-" 

This time, when Peter went off the edge, it looked shattering: his head shook wildly from side to side, his mouth parting wide and panting, trembling as he spilled thickly over his belly, even to his chest. Garthan tried to slow down, but Peter frowned, snarling, " _No_ , no, fuck, keep going," and his lungs felt like they were burning up within him as he obliged, fucking Peter through his orgasm until he stopped shaking against him, until it was finally Garthan's turn to be shattered.

Garthan was too tired to pull out - he merely rolled gingerly until Peter was on top of him instead. Peter's pretty face was still slack, his head bowed as he tried to catch his breath, and Garthan stared up at the ceiling, his chest heaving. The silence was a long one, broken only by their quieting breaths, and then Peter started to chuckle. "Wow." 

"I _really_ should be researching." Garthan didn't look down.

"Uh huh," Peter settled down heavily against his chest, still smug as you please. "Sounds important."

"Very."

"I'll be ready to go again in fifteen minutes," Peter said innocently. "Give or take. In case you were interested."

"... Fuck."

II.

The _Milano's_ replicator managed a surprisingly hearty, chunky soup of unidentifiable materials and even a very good reconstituted bread for dinner, rather to Garthan's surprise. Yesterday, it had even somehow created a very good facsimile of vat-grown steak, fat scoring and all. Peter was blasé about it. "You should see the stuff we get in the _Eclector_. Our replicator tech is Rigellian."

"Isn't that expensive?" Rigellian tech was almost as sought-after as Asgardian tech, if less rare. 

"Yup. It can also make forty different types of alcohol." Peter was already on his second bowl of soup. "It was Kraglin's idea. Part of the package."

"What package?"

Peter grinned. "Life with the Ravagers." 

Garthan's hand froze in mid air for a moment before he continued to eat. He kept forgetting that, somehow. Peter was a Ravager. And he had no intention of leaving that life. 

"You're starting to think like a Corpsman again," Peter guessed, when Garthan said nothing. "Seriously. Just enjoy things while you can." 

"Peter-"

"It's sex. It's not the start and end of everything," Peter was growing defensive again.

"I know." Garthan replied evenly. "But I can't help wishing that you didn't envy the howling wolf so much." 

Peter blinked at him for a moment, then he grinned, a little rueful, a little sharp. "My mom was wrong there. There's three types of people. There's people like you too. You guard the campfire, and you don't fear the wolf." 

"I was afraid in the Razorbacks base."

"But you went in anyway. You fought that thing anyway. No backup, nothing. Bravest thing I've ever seen," Peter said soberly. 

"So did you." 

Peter made a dismissive gesture. "I think that you're wasted guarding the campfire. I'm hoping that someday _you'll_ see that." 

Garthan shook his head slowly, bringing up the holovid feed again as he ate. "You have thirty-five missed calls from the howling wolf," he said dryly, with a glance at the notifications panel, and Peter pulled a face. 

"The den mother in Yondu's going into overdrive. It's been dormant recently. We made a big score in Rigellian space a couple of months back, and it's just been one long drunken frat party since." 

"Two months? Idle? Is that normal?"

"Not usually. That's how I got the opportunity to slip off." Peter shrugged. "Guess the score must have been real big."

"Or," Garthan pointed out dryly, "Maybe they were preparing for something. Like taking sides in a war."

"That's not Yondu's style." 

"The money that corsairs make from crippled military ships is better than chasing relics and cred stores." 

"Maybe," Peter said, in a tone that indicated that he knew exactly what Garthan was talking about, but didn't want to discuss it.

"So I would be very interested in knowing," Garthan continued, "Exactly _when_ Yondu decided that Xandarian territory was a bad place to be." 

"Yondu won't side with the Kree," Peter narrowed his eyes, belligerent again. "We don't have any blue-skinned Kree in the Ravagers, and we've got a bunch of the pink ones. The blue Kree fanatics are racist psychos. Specieist, too." 

"There's spoils to be had from war, even if you don't pick a side." 

Peter chewed on his lower lip, ducking his head, his food forgotten, then he exhaled, very loudly. "It looks to me like the conspiracy's been going on for a cycle and a half. Do we really need whatever Yondu's got?"

"It's always good to have a few perspectives. Right now everything's highly circumstantial. If you're afraid of him-"

"I'm not afraid of him," Peter interrupted, irritable. "It's just that I locked out his access to the ship codes, but if I talk to him again he'll zero in on my location. Then he'll want to stick his huge blue nose into my business." 

"All right," Garthan said. "Your choice." There was a faint ping from the holovid feed. "Another missed call." 

"He'll give up soon. Probably. Maybe." Peter scowled, and made a show of trying to read the rest of the holovid's information grid. "What've you got so far on Kryn?"

"The refugee system's unsustainable in the long run." 

"How long?"

"In theory, the Xandarian empire could probably feed and house them indefinitely. The recycling plants will make sure of that. But in truth," Garthan sighed, "A mass influx of population is never a good thing. All the problems of overcrowding. Higher crime rate, diseases, sanitation-" 

"Maybe you guys should close your borders, then." 

Garthan shook his head. "Supporting the pink-skinned Kree was part of the main cause of the war. The elite Kree declared open hostilities on Xandar when Xandar offered asylum to a family group of mixed blue and pink-skinned Kree, centuries ago. They were activists."

"What happened to them?" 

"They yet have descendants active in the Nova Corps. We'll be meeting one of them upon our arrival." 

Peter fell silent, clearly turning this over in his mind for a long moment. "You guys started a centuries-long intergalactic war over a group of _people_? How many people?"

"Four. And the _Kree_ started the war." 

"And then it just, I don't know, kinda got hard to stop? Or what?" Peter blinked slowly. "On my homeworld, World Wars don't usually last more than maybe four to six _years_."

"There were long periods of ceasefires, but the war would inevitably escalate again. Border skirmishes, for the most part." 

"But nothing like dropping a rock down a gravity well," Peter said soberly.

"No. Intergalactic wars are _usually_ confined to starship warfare," Garthan noted. "To even _think_ of using such a tactic... that's on level of something that the Mad Titan would do. It's ruthless devastation on a planetary scale."

"But you guys haven't budged in centuries, right? So you're pretty evenly matched with the Kree." 

"Only because of the Nova Force," Garthan said, glancing back at the holofeed. 

"Can't you guys maybe ask one of the other intergalactic empires for help? Like Asgard?" 

"We've tried most peaceful avenues over the centuries. The Kree are a proud people. And very militaristic. To their fanatics, the mixed Kree families in Kryn are an abomination. If we want the war to stop, we'll have to give them up. And that will never happen." 

"Maybe it's _not_ a Kree thing," Peter said hopefully. "Maybe using the _Shymr_ was just a coincidence. The Broker said that the First Races artefact market dried up _all over the 'verse_ , remember? Not just in the Xandarian Empire. And besides, what would the Kree want with the artefacts? Most of those weapons don't even work. And it looks like at least half of the stuff on this manifest isn't even weaponised. It's probably just First Races art."

"I was thinking laterally," Garthan said, as he leaned back in his seat. "Who would benefit most if the Worldmind was compromised?" 

"I guess the guys whom you've been at war at since forever," Peter said doubtfully. "I'm just saying, I don't think it fits. I think it's two separate things. I didn't hear anything about First Races stuff when the guys got back from Knowhere."

"Hopefully it has nothing to do with the Kree," Garthan agreed. "But whoever's behind it, _if_ the Worldmind is compromised... the reaper will come from the Kree empire regardless." 

"Well," Peter shrugged. "I think you should stop worrying sick about it. We just need to trace the shipments on Kryn, find whoever's behind it, kick their ass, and get my star map. Seems pretty straightforward to me. What does it matter who's behind what? That's probably something for _Nova Prime_ to worry about." He grinned. "So lighten up. Hey, have you ever tried Rigellian absinthe before? I'm pretty sure this replicator can make it."

"Are you above the legal age for drinking?" 

"You're fucking _kidding_ me," Peter said incredulously, and when Garthan allowed himself a faint smirk, Peter let out an outraged yelp and scrambled around the bolted table. Somehow they ended up on the deck of the ship, Garthan still smirking, Peter growling, wrestling and shoving until Garthan used his superior training and strength to pin Peter down in an arm lock. 

He held Peter down until Peter slapped at Garthan's arm with his free hand. "I give, I give. White flag." Peter rolled over onto his back under Garthan, grinning and a little flushed from the exertion. "That was cheating."

"Oh?"

"You've got super special Nova Corps training." 

"The Ravagers taught you how to shoot. Didn't they bother teaching you hand-to-hand?"

"Nope. Blasters is it. If you've got a gun, you don't need karate." Peter was growing distracted, squirming pointedly against him. 

"What if you're disarmed and pinned to the floor?"

"Like this?" Peter grinned. "I don't know, Officer. I don't really feel like resisting arrest." When Garthan snorted, Peter added, more seriously, "I guess I'd knee you in the..." He paused. "OK. Evolutionary sense. I see your point now." 

"If you use your knees to lever out the-" Garthan began, but Peter had already twisted up to kiss him. Worldmind, Peter's _mouth_. A few days, and Peter was already so confident, licking demandingly past Garthan's lips. Garthan let Peter drive, this time, nice and slow, until his mouth was kiss-swollen, until he was a little dazed from it when Peter rolled him onto his back. 

"Now I'm on top. It worked." Peter flicked at his nose, and Garthan swatted his wrist, too mellow to criticise, though he gasped when Peter slipped his hand down between them and squeezed his cock through his breeches. "He-llo," Peter drawled. "I thought you said you were tired."

"I _am_ tired." Garthan's hips tried to push up against Peter's grip. 

"If you can still get it up, you're not tired enough." Peter tried to push down the hem of Garthan's breeches, but Garthan hastily caught his wrists. 

"Aren't you sore?" 

"Medi-gel is an awesome thing. Also, I can't wait to see Yondu's face when he realizes it's all gone and then puts two and two together."

"It's also in the crew deck. Not here."

"Mmhmm," Peter's mouth twitched up in a decidedly filthy smirk. "Don't worry. I'm still wet from the last time."

"You didn't use the _cleanser_?" Garthan wasn't sure whether to feel horrified or extremely turned on. Something had to be wrong with him. Peter was a bad influence.

"For someone who used to work Vice, you're pretty easily shocked," Peter shot back, and ended up laughing as Garthan growled and shoved him, twisting up until he had Peter pinned against the hull, lifting Peter's weight easily in his arms after he dragged off Peter's breeches. Peter wrapped his legs around Garthan's waist and leaned over for a hungry, eager kiss, pressing a moan against Garthan's mouth that grew desperate when Garthan touched his middle and index finger to the slick opening between Peter's thighs. 

Still loose. But Garthan took his time checking anyway, ignoring Peter's indignant growls and nips against Garthan's neck, until he was sure that Peter could take him. The urgent moan that rattled out when Garthan dragged his own breeches down, then pushed in all the way to the hilt could've come from either of them.

Fucking Peter like this was incredibly _satisfying_. Peter was pinned to the wall with nowhere to go except to take what he was given, and it was obvious that Peter liked that, judging from how loudly he was keening Garthan's name at each punishing thrust that shifted him a couple of finger's breadths up against the ship's hull. Garthan buried his mouth against Peter's neck and tried to breathe, conscious of Peter's hands clawing and digging into his shoulders, the wet heat that he was driving into, the obscene slapping sound that their bodies made whenever he was hilted. 

Peter trembled and tensed up with a cry when he came, overwhelmed, his pretty eyes wide, and Garthan held his dazed stare evenly as he fucked Peter through his orgasm, until Peter started to laugh, delighted and choked up and challenging. When it was Garthan's turn, going over the edge felt like a raw shock of visceral ecstasy sawing through every nerve in his body. 

Gingerly, Garthan somehow managed to turn them around and settle back on the deck without any incident, leaning his skull against the ship's hull, eyes closed and gulping for breath. "Your entire _ship_ is going to need a cleanser after this two weeks."

"I know, right?" Peter sounded entirely too pleased with himself.

"You've got issues, Quill." Garthan slapped at Peter's rump pointedly. "Go and use the damned cleanser." 

"Maybe. I kinda like the feeling."

"Of what?" 

Peter grinned at him, and carefully untangled himself, getting a little shakily to his feet. He turned to go, walking over to the holofeed table, then he glanced back over his shoulder with a sly smirk. 

From Garthan's current position, he had a prime view of Peter's reddened, puffy hole. And the translucent fluid of Garthan's semen as it started to seep out. "Fuck." If he could get hard again, he would've. 

"Cleanser's big enough for two, if you don't mind the fit," Peter purred, and Garthan cursed as he pushed himself up from the deck. Peter was definitely a bad influence.


	10. Chapter 10

I.

Nova Centurion Una was a female hybrid of mixed origin, part Krylorian, part blue Kree, part pink. This, along with generations of growing up on and living on Kryn, a planet with about a lower g force than Xandar, had made her tall and slender-limbed, with an odd pinkish skin tone that was neither Krylorian nor Kree. She had the feathery eyebrows of her Krylorian mother, and her black Kree hair had been shaved off completely, giving her an impassive, doll-like appearance even in her Nova Corps armour.

She was also beautiful, with the delicate cheekbones of a Krylorian but with the proudly arched nose of a Kree, and her long fingers tapped lightly on her hips as she watched Garthan disembark and approach. He saluted her, but she waved dismissively almost at once. 

"Denarian Saal. Welcome to Kryn." 

"Acting-Denarian," Garthan corrected, almost automatically, and Una's severe, unsmiling face creased briefly into something that might have been a grin, but her expression smoothed again as she looked over Garthan's shoulder.

The main spaceport in Kryn was packed. It was larger than the one in Xandar, being the last Core world that had been terraformed, and in the year that Garthan had spent here during rotations, he had never seen it more than three quarters' full. It was full now: a ship had been pried away from port just for the Milano to land, and the wide, vast corridors of port processing were choked with people. 

Mostly, with pink Kree. Waiting for the next refugee ship to come, perhaps, or hoping for work: Garthan couldn't quite tell. Now and then, he could spot Nova Corpsmen in the crowd, keeping order, but there was a tension in the air, a brittleness that his instincts hated. 

Kryn wasn't just 'delicate'. It was a damned _tinderbox_.

Eventually, Peter gave up haranguing the overloaded port official and squeezed through to Garthan's side, looking profoundly unhappy. "I hope you guys are footing the berth fees. At this rate, I'm not even sure if the 'biggest score' of Yondu's career can cover the loss I'm going to make."

"The berth fee will be waived," Una said mildly, and Peter shot her an assessing, all too interested stare that made the breath catch in Garthan's throat.

He let it out quickly enough, quietly kicking himself, but Una's glance flicked between them, then settled on Garthan. "This is your... associate? Peter Quill?"

"He has an arrangement with the Worldmind."

"Yes," Una said, her tone somehow subtly indicating disapproval without her expression even changing. "I have heard."

"I thought that all the Centurions were off at the border," Peter said, puzzled. 

"I returned for this matter after accessing Denarian Saal's assessment of the situation." 

" _Acting_ -Denarian," Garthan said, but they both ignored him.

"What." Peter blinked. "You got back from the border in two _weeks?_ "

"I was stationed closer by than the others. Come." Una turned, striding briskly away. The crowds around her parted hastily when they got a look at the triangular, three-noded rank on her chestplate, and Garthan and Peter followed in her wake. 

A Nova Corps hovercraft was waiting for them outside the port terminal, and unusually for Kryn, it was securely locked, the silvery sheen of a stasis field surrounding the hovercraft. At Garthan's querying glance, Una dismissed the field and stepped over to the flight controls. "Public order is not what it has been," Una said, by way of explanation. 

"People would steal from the Nova Corps?" Garthan asked, incredulous. 

"The situation is difficult." Una manipulated the controls, and the hovercraft rose gently into the air. It had no seats, save for the pilot: hovercraft like these were for transporting freight, usually evidence. Peter and Garthan had no choice but to hold on to the rails at the edges of the hovercraft, watching as they left the milling throngs in the port behind them. Some of those loitering about had luggage with them.

"Are they homeless or something?" Peter asked, still staring down at the crowds. 

"By choice." Una said, aiming them at the graceful, silvery spires of the Core precinct, visible over the sprawling metropolis before them. 

Unlike Xandar, which looked like a vast, beautifully planned park at the top level, Kryn was a patchwork of squat, functional settler buildings matched with a hodgepodge of construction from almost every identifiable race that had set up shop in Kryn. He could see domed Rigellian structures, bluff Kree-styled windowless blocks, glass Krylorian archways and more, with no real attempt at city planning or a general aesthetic. 

Xandar was a far more beautiful city, Garthan decided, but there was something visceral and _alive_ about Kryn, like a creature that wore all of its past and future on its skin. Xandar may be the heart of the Xandarian empire, Ysaros its manufacturing heart, but was Kryn that reflected its core ethos. On the face of Kryn were all races and species equally represented; on its face were all people one.

"By choice?" Garthan asked, surprised. The Kryn he had remembered was nowhere as populous as Xandar: it had space to spare, particularly in the arid, hotter central landscapes, where agritowns were still friendly to anyone willing to work. 

"Kryn is the closest Core world to the Kree empire, and the Core world with the most outcast Kree population," Una pointed out. "Some think, quite rightly, that the hammer will strike here first." 

"They're not homeless," Peter said suddenly. "The Kree at the spaceport. They're hoping for a ride out." 

"The refugee situation must be confined to Kryn." Una confirmed. "The other Core planets simply do not have the space - or resources. In time, we hope that there will be long-term solutions for the situation."

"Long term?" Peter echoed. "You guys have been fighting for _centuries_." 

"I understand that better than you think, Earther."

"Una is a descendant of one of the four," Garthan said mildly, and Peter grimaced. 

"I didn't mean any offense."

"None was taken." Una flicked her glance out over the patchwork hide of the city.

"How long has the city been like this?" Peter asked.

"Since Hylaraan. There was an influx of refugees before, a small but steady stream. Most chose to gather together and start colonies of their own on habitable planets. But once the Kree changed the scope of their resolve..."

"They thought they'd be safer in the Xandarian Empire?" Peter guessed. 

"Yes. Many of the new colonies fled here. To control the flood, we locked down on refugee transport routes to the other two Core worlds and focused traffic on Kryn." Una let out a soft sigh. "Most of the Kree Supreme Council, the Accusers, are now made of the faction known as the Pure. They have been increasing the volume of their rhetoric against the Xandarian Empire of late. Tensions are rising."

"Really?" Peter asked, mystified. "When we talked to your boss, he said that you guys like refugees."

"We do," Garthan was still looking back at the vast spaceport behind them, receding into the distance. 

"Guess loving and accepting your neighbor is a bit harder when your neighbor's enemy starts to drop rocks down gravity wells?" Peter asked dryly, and Garthan grimaced. 

"Cynical as that statement is for one of your years," Una said, a little reproachfully, "Unfortunately, it is absolutely correct. And the Worldmind has no real solution to the problem."

II.

The Core precinct was unsettlingly empty, and Garthan tried not to gawk as Una took them briskly to the lifts. He had lived much of his life in and out of Core precincts, and he had _never_ seen one without a morass of ground activity. He pinged the Worldmind with a query, and it fed him back a summary of the patrol rosters. The local Nova Corps were out in force.

Not that it would help. Kryn had a total Nova Corps force of eight hundred and twelve: including Garthan. After seeing the mass of people in the port, for the first time in his life, Garthan questioned whether the number of Corpsmen was going to be enough.

The lift, like most of the architecture on Kryn, was built for the longer-boned people born and bred on the planet, but other than that was an exact facsimile of the lift in Xandar, as was the rest of the Core precinct. Garthan felt himself relax as the lift started to move, and was calm again by the time it disgorged them into a room that for all appearances was exactly the same as Kernel in Xandar. 

"Again?" Peter muttered, but he subsided at a level stare from Una. The Centurion walked into the chamber, but before she could reach the centre of it, the room seemed to come alive around her, with a huge holographic projection of Kryn to Una's right, and eight metre-long panels of statistics flickering into view, orbiting the projection. 

"Can you rouse the Worldmind?" Garthan asked, as he looked at one of the projections. It was a list of Kree refugee ships - and Garthan knew without pinging the Worldmind that it was probably a list of refugee ships whose arrival on Kryn might have coincided with the launch of a gas hauler owned by the Razorbacks' company. 

"It is thinking."

"If it's got three thousand servers, maybe it should think _faster_ ," Peter said, looking from one screen to the next. 

"The enemy that you faced in the recycling plant," Una said quietly. "It... disengaged Denarian Saal from the Worldmind. But only enough to disable the Nova Force. The Worldmind is concerned." 

"Disengaged?" Garthan echoed, unable to believe it. "How?"

Una shot him a faintly reproachful look. "Psionically, of course." She turned back to studying the huge floating projection of Kryn. "The impossible has become possible. We have faced psionists before of varying strengths. But none have managed to sever the Worldmind's connection to a Corpsman."

"If it was that strong," Peter said, puzzled, "Why not disengage Saal entirely?"

"The greatest scientific minds in the Xandarian Empire have been studying Denarian Saal's visual feed of the battle and the initial scans of the... object for two weeks. We have also been collecting what data we could from a source within Knowhere." 

"You guys are really everywhere, huh." Peter looked impressed. 

"This... source is what you would call... an information broker. Of sorts. He is a very old being, even by how the Asgardians count Time. He was able to give us a few valuable insights into 'kraka'." Una turned slowly to regard Garthan. "The information we have to date is... troubling." 

Garthan pinged the Worldmind, but came up with a blank. "I can't access the information."

Una nodded. "It's at Centurion-level access at present. We'll inform you on a need-to-know basis. There's no need to spread this matter further than it already has, especially with the situation in Kryn as it is."

"That's - with all due respect - bullshit, lady," Peter glowered at her. " _We_ fought this thing." 

"Quill," Garthan snapped, and Peter subsided, if with an exasperated expression. 

Una didn't even blink. "We know two things for certain at present. One, that 'kraka' is indeed sourced from the brain matter of the dead Celestial of Knowhere. 'Krakashium' is not its original name. It was derived from the name of the Celestial itself, Kra'kashan, who was one of the First Races. It was made by people who wished to 'transcend', to merge with the Celestial. It is a highly complex, modified compound originally made to modify a user's brain chemistry, with a self-replicating biological code that would recreate a user's brain into a miniature replica of a Celestial's."

"That's... all right, even for Knowhere, that's insane," Peter blinked.

"So it didn't work," Garthan surmised, "And the biological component became a bioweapon?"

"Scientific opinion believes that it _did_ work," Una said quietly. "But a single modern organism's brain was insufficient. It needed more brain matter. It seems that it forces one host to seek others. It spreads upon contact with the... reprocessed fluids of its host. Not just through touch. When it reaches a critical mass of hosts, it repurposes them."

"Critical mass? Like that... cube?" Garthan was trying and failing to grasp the very idea.

"Possibly. But I think that the creature you encountered was still insufficient. It needed more mass. All that the cube could do was cry, and lash out." 

"Like a baby," Peter said, and shivered. 

"So it couldn't have been whatever it was that engineered the freight transports." Not that Garthan had really wanted that decidedly alien monster to be capable of something that subtle.

Una nodded. "No. There is another controlling party."

"But why make it in the Razorbacks' plant?" Peter frowned at the holofeed before him as though it had the answer. "If that wasn't enough mass?" 

"Maybe it was a test. To see if it would work. Since their experiment in Knowhere was destroyed." Garthan glanced at the projection of Kryn, and exhaled. "If it truly is Kree fanatics at work, there are less complicated ways to attack the Xandarian empire."

"Not without sacrificing most of their fleet. We are matched at military strength. Perhaps ours will be greater, simply by way of our determination, for we have seen what lengths they are willing to go to. But if they could disrupt the Worldmind, _and_ destroy the single largest pink Kree-populated planet outside of the Kree dominion..." 

"Yondu said the Kree are doing something soon," Peter nodded. "I guess this is it." 

Privately, Garthan thought that it was still too easy a conclusion, but he said nothing. Arguing the _why_ of it was wasting time. "We could start with the crew of the _Shymr_." 

"I've already sent a planetwide alert to have them brought in." Una's brow creased very slightly.

"Let me guess," Peter said, with a sigh. "They're nowhere to be found." 

"And we do not have the resources to conduct a planetwide search, as invested as we currently are in the peacekeeping endeavour." Una nodded. "I having been pursuing my own sources, to no avail. It falls to you both. But be mindful of the need to be discreet."

"Great."

III.

They had been allocated separate rooms in the Core precinct's attached dormitory, but Peter had pushed right past Garthan into Garthan's room, eyes darting around, probably picking out the best exit strategy or, in alternative, the most valuable item. There was a balcony that looked out over the vast sprawl of the city, four floors up, and basic furniture: a desk with a chair, a single bed, and a small ensuite bathroom.

"Wow," Peter said, looking around again. "You guys really aren't into the high life."

"These rooms are for Corpsmen in transit who prefer not to source their own living quarters." Garthan sat down on the bed and started to pull off his boots. "I lived in one of these for a cycle or so."

Peter slid onto his lap, grinning wickedly. "I don't think you would've impressed anyone you brought home. Or did you guys just sleep with each other?"

"Fraternising within the Nova Corps is highly discouraged."

"Just when I thought you guys couldn't get more straight-laced." Peter ducked his head, pressing a teasing kiss over the corner of Garthan's lips, grinning when Garthan merely trapped him with a gentle hand behind his skull to kiss him more firmly. "So I guess, since I'm the only available person in this block, I should be pretty popular, huh?"

Garthan tried to school his expression. "I presume so."

Peter smirked. "You're jealous."

"Not in the least."

"Still a bad liar." Peter's smirk faded, however, and he studied Garthan thoughtfully. "After this. I'm really going to go back to the Ravagers, you know." 

"I know." Garthan stroked his hands lazily up Peter's thighs, to his hips, then back down, but Peter didn't take the invitation to shift closer.

"I can visit. Come back now and then." 

"How are you going to sneak that past Yondu?" Garthan asked, instead of asking what he felt like asking, irrationally, madly.

"Yondu's not omniscient." Peter said, very gently. "But the fact is. I really do like you, Garthan. Still. It's never going to be enough. I'm sorry. I still have all of the 'verse to see, and you'll never leave the Corps."

"I know." There was a wildness in Peter that could not be broken. He could see that much. 

"Maybe things will change. When I'm older." Peter tried, his tone comforting. "But it's not like I want you to wait. That won't be fair."

"I know."

"And to be honest," Peter continued, "I think we'll probably drive each other batshit crazy after a month. Maybe less. We'll be climbing the walls or clawing each other's eyes out. We'll probably have completely awesome make-up sex, but it'll become some sort of crazy cycle. You're never going to be able to trust me. It won't work." 

Garthan nodded. He could see that happening. It was purpose that bound them both together right now, purpose and luck. Once that faded, their personalities would clash. They each lived for something that was at polar opposites to the other. 

"But still," Peter breathed out, a ragged sound, "I'll say 'no', but I'm still going to be a complete asshole right now and tell you that I still would've liked you to ask. I was thinking that you would, all the way here. Even though I was going to say 'no' and I was dreading it."

"Peter," Garthan leaned up, to brush a kiss on Peter's forehead. "Stay with me," he said, more softly, as Peter sucked in a broken gasp. 

"Tell me that we can make this work."

He brushed his kiss lower, over the bridge of Peter's nose. "We can make this work." 

"Tell me that you think you can love me." 

This was the easiest thing to say, and also the hardest. "I love you." 

Peter let out the breath he was holding in, and closed his eyes. His voice shook. "You're such a bad liar."


	11. Chapter 11

I.

A new suit of armour was waiting for Garthan in the morning, delivered to his room by dormitory staff. It had the two-barred Denarian rank emblazoned on the chestpiece rather than his single Millennian rank, and as Garthan brought it into his room, puzzled, Peter pushed up onto his elbows on the bed.

"Congrats?" Peter suggested. 

"Centurion Una probably made a mistake." Garthan hesitated for a moment, then he left it on the armour rack in the small closet.

"She's your superior commanding officer, isn't she? Maybe she thinks your dress code should be updated." 

"It's incorrect."

"Maybe you should check."

Garthan levelled a stare at Peter, but Peter merely returned an innocent smile, and with a sigh of exasperation, Garthan went to use the cleanser. While it worked, he rubbed his eyes and pinged the Worldmind, accessing his own file. He didn't remember the last time he had tried something like this. After he had first been assessed, perhaps. 

He was surprised to note that his rank had been updated to 'Denarian', with no footnote about it being a temporary promotion. Puzzled, he pinged the Worldmind for a query, but got no answer. Garthan briefly thought about pinging Una directly, but it seemed so trivial a matter that he thought against it, finishing up in the cleanser and heading back into the room, where he found Peter curiously examining both sets of chestplates, unselfconsciously naked. 

By the Worldmind. If Garthan hadn't just spent the last hour fucking Peter into the bed, he probably would've been ready to go at the very sight. As it was, a hum of desire still shivered through him, and made him straighten up.

"Did you wipe your hands?" Garthan asked, a little breathlessly, and Peter briefly stuck his tongue out at Garthan in a gesture that was presumably meant to be childish. Garthan wasn't too sure. 

"You should wear the new one," Peter told him. "It'll suit you."

"There's no significant difference between the new one and the old one." 

Peter shrugged, even as he circled around to use the cleanser in turn. "Maybe Centurion Una thought that it'll be more effective for a Denarian to be visibly conducting the enquiries." 

That made sense. Reluctantly, Garthan put on the new armour, feeling a little like a fraud, and was sitting on the chair buckling on his boots when Peter got out of the cleanser, grinned, and walked over as though about to climb onto Garthan's lap.

"Not now," Garthan said hastily.

"I don't think we've ever done it with you in your armour," Peter said, with an inviting grin. 

"What about breakfast?"

"I'm offering to suck your cock and you want to talk about breakfast?" 

Garthan had to take a few, slightly unsteady breaths to calm down. "I'm... I'm not going to be able to-"

Peter's grin widened. "I don't mind trying until you're ready to go again. I'm pretty patient." 

Fuck. "Get dressed. I'll meet you in the mess hall," Garthan said firmly, and because a naked Peter was a weapon in and of itself, he scrambled out from under Peter and ducked out of the room before Peter could protest. 

By the time he made it to the mess hall, the usual breakfast time was almost over. Tightened wartime rations meant a mealcard platter of reconstituted bread and jams and a half-decent cup of black, but Garthan had never been a fussy eater, and he was starting to feel somewhat saner by the time Peter grumpily appeared and got his own breakfast. 

Peter did sit with him though, drawing curious looks from across the hall, some more avid than others. "Geez," Peter murmured, as he sat down opposite Garthan at his table. "You'd think that I walked in butt naked or something."

"You're the only non-Corpsman in here other than the staff."

"Obviously. You guys don't usually have guests?"

"Not unless they were integral to a case."

"Well, I like to think that I'm integral to your cube brain case," Peter said, with a quick grin. "Maybe I need a visitor pass?"

"Maybe."

"I'm an expert witness. I saw and torched the last one." 

"That's not what an expert witness does." Garthan wished that he had waited longer for the breakfast rush to fully clear out. "They're probably wondering what a new Denarian is doing sitting alone at a bench with someone so..." _hot_ "young."

Peter seemed to have heard the unspoken word anyway. He grinned, made a show of looking around, and before Garthan could react, Peter leaned across the table and kissed Garthan hard on the mouth. Garthan stiffened up instantly, flushing with embarrassment when the kiss went on, then there was a murmur of laughter behind Peter. 

"What are you _doing_?" Garthan hissed, when Peter sat down. 

"Answering some questions?" Peter said innocently. "Take a look around, Officer. No one's staring anymore."

Garthan checked the area through his peripheral vision and found that Peter was right. His fellow Corpsmen had come to an instant conclusion and had left them to it. They had probably assumed that Peter was some young lover who had tagged along with Garthan when he had transferred to Kryn. Which wasn't, Garthan noted sourly, entirely inaccurate.

It _would_ have been... Garthan would not have been averse to that being true. Deep down. 

"Just eat," Peter said, with a faint smirk. "Before you implode." 

"You're impossible," Garthan muttered. 

"Look at it this way," Peter noted, even as he dug in. "Getting around is going to be way easier now. If I ever had to head back ahead of time." 

"Or get offworld?" The question slipped out before he could help himself.

Peter's smirk faded. "Garthan-"

"You don't need to say it," Garthan said tiredly, and Peter clenched his jaw briefly before nodding curtly and picking up his slice of reconstituted bread. 

Garthan finished his breakfast mechanically, nursing his cup of black until Peter was done, checking the morning's newscast. The local news on Kryn was more Kree-centric, naturally, and the morning's news seemed mostly interested in dissecting the radical wing of Accusers who had risen to power. 

"I don't get people like that," Peter said, listening in on the newscast, head slightly tilted. 

Even rumpled as he was now - or because he was - Garthan couldn't help but secretly admire Peter from across the table, memorising the graceful angles of his face. It felt inexorable, like a magnetic pull, made all the stronger because of the ironclad knowledge that what Garthan had now with Peter was only temporary. The thought of this had _hurt_ , last night, when he had explored it in his mind after Peter had fallen asleep tucked against him, like a wound getting gnawed open, but now, when he examined it again, the hurt was less. That was a relief, in a way. Garthan hadn't expected to even get attached to Peter, let alone so much and so quickly. 

He was a fool after all.

"Like what?" Garthan asked distractedly.

"That guy, for example." Peter pointed at one of the younger-looking Accusers in the holovid uploaded by the newscast, the little ticker-tape caption animating as it sensed Peter's gesture, spelling out _Radical New Accusers in the Kree Supreme Council_. "He looks like maybe he's your age, or a bit older. But he totally believes in this shit. That he's better'n almost everyone else in the 'verse because his skin is blue and his hair is black? That's balls."

"Sadly it's not an unusual opinion." 

"I know. My homeworld's full of this kind of shit. I was hoping to have escaped it by coming up here." Peter sighed. "All the science in the 'verse and still so much stupid everywhere."

Garthan looked pensively at the young Accuser's face. There was a hardness to his eyes, a cold set to his jaw, and a brutality to his youthful features due to the black warpaint drawn over his cheeks and eyes. "Power corrupts," he said finally, almost inaudibly. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have all the power he could ever want at his fingertips - perhaps having an unlimited access to the Nova Force - and shuddered. Nothing good could come of something like that.

II.

The _Shymr_ had been systematically swept by forensics after it had been impounded under investigation. None of the other refugee ships that possibly correlated were still planetside. Garthan stood in the centre of the hollowed out cargo area, studying the cargo manifest that he had brought up on his wrist feed.

"Looks legit," Peter said, prowling in a wide circle in the cargo area. "Where did you guys find her?"

"Still docked. She was being repaired and refuelled." 

"Repaired?"

"She was a little shot up." Garthan glanced at the manifest again. "It's increasingly common for refugee ships running the Kree barricade over to our borders." 

"You don't sound convinced."

"Do you think that any Destroyer-class ships willing to take a shot at a civilian refugee ship with no military-grade shielding would have been content with just taking a few shots at its cargo bay?"

Peter looked around the cargo bay with a new curiosity, then he walked over to a point on the hull and ran his fingers over the newly patched surface. "Gauss round? Must have punched right through the ship."

"It did." 

"Warning shot?"

"Not a chance. I'm thinking it was deliberate. To maybe encourage the genuine refugees on the ship not to look in the cargo bay. Since it's in vacuum." 

"So there were genuine refugees on this ship?" Peter looked confused. "Wait. I thought Una said that the crew was nowhere to be found."

"The _crew_ wasn't. The refugees who were on the _Shymr_ were taken in for questioning. Subtly. As far as the Worldmind and the interviewing Corpsmen are concerned, the refugees are genuine. They're colonists from Ashun, a mineral-rich world close to the Kree blockade. They didn't think there was anything strange about the _Shymr_. The life support decks were packed full. Ashun was a very small colony. Everyone left." 

"They didn't think about how the _Shymr_ magically showed up on Ashun to save their asses?" 

Garthan shrugged. "Pink Kree and those sympathetic to their cause have been running the Kree blockade for years. They've been stepping up evac of the small colonies closest to the blockade."

"So maybe you could question this people smuggling outfit."

Garthan shook his head. "Not that simple. They're a very loose confederacy, bound by purpose and desperation more than anything."

"Yeah, right," Peter looked amused. "That's bullshit." 

"Oh?"

"Are you guys patching up these refugee ships for free? Fuel and everything?" 

Garthan checked the manifests. "They're funded by the local Kree community and a string of nonprofits." 

"And where are all these ships from, huh?" Peter patted the hull of the _Shymr_. "Because this baby here doesn't look like a repurposed hauler at all. It _looks_ blocky on the outside, but if you cut off the window dressing around the thrusters and near the nose, I bet you'll find a ship that looks a damn sight slimmer. You guys even check the onboard systems?" 

"What are you getting at, Peter?"

"The _Eclector_ has a pretty good inventory of a lot of rival outfits." Peter was studying the patched repairs again. "There's a lot of money to be made running blockades. People who want to run offworld in a hurry will pay, and keep paying."

"There's a real smuggling outfit involved?"

"Has to be. Civvie freight doesn't exactly outrun military blockades very well. They can't keep getting this 'lucky'." Peter headed to the bolted ladder, climbing quickly up into the living deck, then up to the crew deck, with Garthan on his heels. "Notice that?"

"What?" 

Peter grinned at him. "How the floor thickness of the crew deck is kinda different from the floor between the living deck and the cargo hold?" 

Garthan cursed, looking around sharply. The crew deck was designed for efficiency, not comfort. Bunks lined the wall next to a couple of cleansers, the table was bolted down, and there was a holofeed set into the wall above the replicator, switched off. Other than that, there was nothing strange that he could see. 

"It's okay," Peter said comfortingly. "You guys just really aren't into port control. I get that." 

"There's a hidden... panel? Somewhere?" Garthan stared at the ground.

"I'm thinking there's a hidden something _everywhere_ ," Peter said, tapping at the deck he was standing on with a grin.

With a sigh, Garthan called it in, and forensics pinged him back to inform him of their ETA. "They should have scanned the ship." 

"Probably did," Peter said agreeably. "But there's ways around a basic scan, and these guys were probably the pros."

"'Were'?"

"A smuggling outfit probably wouldn't have left their ship unattended. That's their bread and butter getting impounded."

"How did you know it was unattended?"

Peter smiled faintly. "I didn't see any newscast about a shootout in the port. Also, it doesn't take five days to refuel and repair a few holes in the hull." 

"You would make a good Corpsman," Garthan said, all unthinking, and Peter's smile froze and faded.

"I would make an _awesome_ Corpsman," Peter corrected, but the humour wasn't anywhere in his eyes, and after an awkward silence, Peter headed up the ladder towards the flight deck.

Garthan joined him there only when the forensics crew showed up, and found Peter sitting on the pilot's seat, his heels propped up on the control panels. He sat down on the co-pilot's seat, and shot the window a quick glance - nothing to see out there, save for the wall of the impound hangar. "Peter."

"Don't say it, OK?"

"Say what?"

Peter let out a frustrated huff. "You know why I pushed you to say all those things last night? So we could just get it over with, all right? All our cards on the table. It's done."

"You still stayed in my bed." 

"Got to keep appearances up?" Peter suggested, though there was no mischief in his tone, and he wasn't looking at Garthan. "It won't work out."

"I know." 

"I want to go back to the Ravagers."

"Now you do, yes. But when you're older? I bet that Yondu's attitude will start to chafe. Then you'll realize," Garthan said calmly, "That life there is just another campfire. If a far more dangerous one."

Peter's eyes narrowed, but he didn't look over. "If it gets that way then I'll leave." 

"And keep running?"

"I've got a ship with a stardrive now. I can go where I want." Peter swung his legs off the panel, and uncurled from the pilot's seat, taking a step over and straddling Garthan's lap before Garthan could think to move out of the way. Peter's mouth was set into a grim line, his eyes dangerous the way Garthan hadn't seen it before, and Worldmind, but there was definitely something wrong with Garthan himself. Just the heat and weight of Peter sitting against him was starting to make him hard. 

"Go on," Peter growled. "Fucking lecture me again." 

"Get off."

"You think you know so much better than me," Peter hissed, and deliberately rolled his hips. Despite himself, Garthan let out a badly stifled groan. "You _don't_." 

"Peter," Garthan tried again, but Peter kissed him, all teeth and anger this time; Garthan cut his lip on the edge of Peter's teeth and flinched, but Peter sucked on the mauled flesh, greedy as anything. If Garthan wasn't hard before, he would have gotten rock hard right then. His cock ached, hungry for the tight, clenching heat he had grown used to, but Garthan kept his hands loose at his sides. 

"It was just two weeks of sex, all right?" Peter said harshly, pulling back only enough to speak. "It wasn't anything," Peter added, his tone troubled and low, as if talking to himself.

"If you like." 

Peter shot him a look that was liquid with distress, then he exhaled loudly and slumped against Garthan, hands curling into the buckles of Garthan's chestplate armour over his flanks, tucking his cheek high up over Garthan's shoulder. "It should've been nothing," Peter said finally, in a small voice. "I fucking hate you sometimes." 

Garthan didn't say anything, though he brought his hands up, hugging Peter to him, and Peter made a tiny, gulping sound. "You let the Milano voice print me as the captain. Why?"

"Didn't you want it?"

"I did, but the ship wasn't in the deal, was it? If you had imprinted yourself-"

Garthan found himself struggling to explain impulse, and circumstance, and finally settled with, "It wasn't stolen property, or evidence."

"Wasn't mine, either."

"It seemed like the right thing to do," Garthan said finally, then added, more gently, "I liked the idea of you having more options. Even if you choose not to use them."

"No one's ever been nice to me just for the sake of it before," Peter said, in the same, small voice. "Not for a long time."

"I could guess."

Peter mulled this over, silent, and Garthan listened to Peter's breathing, its shaky cadence, and gently petted Peter's back, smoothing his palm over the curve of Peter's spine. His arousal had wilted, but it felt good to hold Peter like this, just the two of them. 

"I'll visit," Peter said finally. 

"Is that a good idea?"

"Probably not." Peter let out a sharp laugh. 

"You'll be busy exploring the universe." 

"That's the plan," Peter agreed, and reared up. His eyes were a little reddened, but the wildness was back in him, and this was the part of Peter that Garthan could never love. For there was a bit of the howling wolf in Peter as well, restless and feral, which lived to run in the wild edges of the universe and didn't quite care what or whom it trampled to get there. 

It was the part of Peter that no one could have. 

"Send me a notecard," Garthan said finally, though his voice felt thick in his throat, and Peter ducked his head, with a low laugh.

"On Earth, we call that a 'postcard'," Peter said, and he rested his forehead against Garthan's, in a gesture that seemed far more intimate than anything else they had ever done together. It felt like surrender, like the start of a long farewell, and Garthan wanted to fight it.


	12. Chapter 12

I.

They scrambled apart at a brisk "Denarian Saal?" from the crew deck, and Peter shot Garthan a strangely frozen look when Garthan deliberately leaned over to press a kiss on his mouth, chaste after the past two weeks. Then he left Peter to the flight deck and climbed down to see what forensics wanted.

Most forensic teams were exclusively Nova Corps staff, not Corpsmen at all, but this one had a Denarian in charge, perhaps highlighting the gravity of the situation. The Worldmind helpfully pinged Garthan with Denarian Suni's file as he got close. She was a Rigellian, her features birdlike and delicate under the slightly oversized dome of her head, her short, tufted silver hair combed to two points behind her skull. 

"Denarian Saal," Suni's words, like many Rigellians, were spoken in rapid fire. 

"Acting-Denarian," Garthan corrected, but Suni merely shot him a vague look of puzzlement before walking over to the deck. The techs had pulled up much of the panelling, revealing crawl spaces beneath. Most were empty, but one had a collection of illegal D'Bari clawguns, and two contained long boxes of some sort of alcohol, judging from the reading. 

The last crawlspace was the most arresting. There was a dead D'Bari, body shrivelled and withered to a point where Garthan couldn't quite tell what gender or age it was, her green skin and thick hair tinted with gray, lips curled high to bare the thick wedges of teeth. The forensic scan indicated an estimated death of approximately one and a half cycles ago, and that the subject was female.

"Holy shit," Peter breathed, from behind him, and Suni's gaze snaps behind Garthan.

"It is very irregular for a civilian to be present, Denarian Saal."

"Peter, can you wait on the living deck?"

"I'm not just a-"

"Please."

He could hear Peter let out an irritated exhalation, but by the sounds of it, the boy was climbing down the ladder. Garthan looked back at the scan. No decomposition - unsurprisingly. The crawlspace had been airtight. "The D'Bari killed herself?"

"Perhaps. She was clearly not a refugee. Her gear appears characteristic of a spacer crew member. Note the blaster holster at her hip." 

"So she was probably one of the smugglers," Garthan decided. "She must have been, to know where the crawl spaces were. But she must also have known that they were airtight." 

"The crawl spaces are vacuum sealed _during_ spaceflight," Suni corrected. "It is more likely that she came here to hide temporarily when the ship was on the ground. Look at this." Suni gestured, and a Xandarian staff tech turned over a sliced panel with gloved hands. On the interior metal plate were what looked like black paint lines, some smudged, some sharp, especially nearer the edges. 

"She closed the crawlspace and couldn't get out," Garthan guessed, feeling a little sickened. "And then she suffocated or died of thirst. Wouldn't there have been some sort of smell?" 

"Not with the fabrication of the lining." Suni said, gesturing. "No self-respecting smuggling outfit would have hidden spaces which weren't scan and scent tight."

"Something happened one and a half cycles ago," Garthan murmured, even as the Worldmind pinged them both with a DNA scan. The victim's name had been Shi'Mzka, thirty-one cycles old as at the time of death, born to second generation D'Bari settlers on Ysaros. She was listed as 'Self-Employed', but a note in her file suggested that she was part of the Qodesa. 

Suni frowned unhappily. "Oh. Them." 

"I'm familiar with the Qodesa," Garthan said quietly. He had been part of Vice when he had been stationed on Kryn, after all.

"Good luck," Suni said, and turned back to the body. Garthan nodded and climbed down to the living deck, where Peter was nowhere to be seen. Shaking his head, Garthan pinged the Worldmind, which told him that Peter was just outside the _Shymr_ , in the impound hangar. 

Peter was studying a Sh'iar N'Ra, a sleek little pleasure ship equipped with a stardrive, a luxurious toy that had probably been impounded for illegal substances possession or worse. Sometimes, the very rich needed an object lesson in the incorruptibility of the Nova Corps. 

"Got anything?" Peter asked, his voice edged.

"Some." Garthan hesitated, and Peter rolled his eyes.

"Let me guess. That D'Bari belonged to some big-shot smuggling crew, probably drug runners, and since you were originally from Vice you're familiar with them, so you want me to butt out of the investigation and sit tight in my room." 

"Good guess. She was part of the Qodesa."

"It's not a fucking guess. I can see it on your face." Peter folded his arms. "If I had butted out of the last time you told me to leave the area you would now be dead. Or worse."

"I know that." 

"And so?" Peter demanded belligerently. "So what what if the Qodesa were some sort of big shot gang, or whatever they are? If they've gone the way of the Razorbacks, they're probably a jelly cube by now." 

"The Qodesa are - or were - skinrunners, Peter. Do you know what that means? Their targets were the young. Xandarian, Rigellian... they didn't care. Sent to unlicensed brothels or buyers. When they got older, or used up, they went to the meat farms."

Peter's expression creased in disgust. " _Meat_ farms?"

"Organ farms. Artificial make has problems, unless you buy Rigellian, and even if you do, there's still a higher rejection percentage for fully lab grown. It's cheaper to buy the real thing." Garthan looked up at the Sh'iar ship, without really taking in any detail. "It was one of my first cases, right out of the Academy."

"Okay." Peter's tone turned gentler. "I can see how that would've been... would've left an impression." He paused. "These people were running the refugee jumps? Before the sudden takeover?"

"Possibly. It makes a sort of sense," Garthan said grimly. "Fleece the refugees and cull the herd. Especially if they offer to take 'women and children first'. Not every refugee ship makes it to Kryn. They could write off a few 'losses'." 

Peter shuddered. "But seriously. If it's like Xandar, these kid smugglers are gone, so-" 

"My case went cold. The Qodesa went underground. We lost three Corpsmen in the raid, including a Denarian," Garthan said, his tone still quiet and flat. "Some organisation taking out the Razorbacks? Sure. But I hesitate to think what could've taken on the Qodesa and won. Centurian Una will likely lead the advance force." 

"Oh." Peter relaxed. "You sure? They won't hang you out to dry again?" 

Garthan pinged the Worldmind, and got an affirmative from Una herself, almost instantly. "I'm sure. Once we find them. But that'll likely just be a question of time. Vice is already starting a round of their usual haunts."

"So you want me to stay out of firing range?"

"Yes."

"That's cool. I can do that." Peter grinned at him. "I'm pretty good at that. Don't worry." 

"You'll stay in the Core precinct?"

"Hey, I didn't say that," Peter said quickly. "I haven't been on Kryn before. Give me a break. I'm going to go out and take a look around." 

"By yourself?"

Peter rolled his eyes. "I'm a big boy. _And_ I'm armed. Go find your evil jelly brain cube. Ping me when you're done." When Garthan frowned a little, Peter said dryly, "The star map's probably still in transit, remember? There's nothing for me down where you're headed. If you're really going in with backup this time, knock yourself out."

True. Garthan pushed down his worry and the irrational sense of disappointment. "Do you, ah... do you want some credits?"

Peter started to laugh. "What, you want to be my sugar daddy?"

Allspeak struggled a little, but the gist was clear. Garthan flushed. "In the interests of theft prevention."

"No, I'm good." Peter stepped over, and kissed him a little tentatively on the cheek. "And I'll _be_ good too, if it'll keep you from stressing out and growing wrinkles. Okay?"

"All right," Garthan said, his hand curling around Peter's waist, and Peter hesitated, studying him for a long moment before his lip quirked, and he pulled away, his eyes unreadable.

II.

Frustratingly enough, the leads went cold, even with almost all of Vice working overtime. The Qodesa had seemingly disappeared without a trace, one and a half cycles ago, and the general mood even among the other criminal outfits and the informants underground was that it was good riddance to bad blood.

At least Peter seemed to be enjoying himself. Kryn was probably a more interesting city for the young, compared to industrialised Ysaros and tightly planned Xandar. Garthan had been worried during the first two days, but when Peter always promptly showed up at dinner to talk excitedly about his day, he started to relax. Peter continued to ignore his own room. Garthan decided to try, for now, to ignore what would come next.

And then a week passed, and another day, and a refugee ship, the _Eine_ , hailed the spaceport, requesting a docking bay. It was one and a half tonnes heavier than it should have been. 

Una and Garthan watched the landing procedures from a maintenance catwalk, with Una standing rigidly upright, hands folded behind her back, and Garthan leaning his elbows against the rail. He felt exhausted. Sleep hadn't been coming easy over the week, even with - or perhaps because of - Peter in his arms. The arrival of the _Eine_ seemed to mark the beginning of the end. 

"You are troubled," Una said, her tone inflectionless.

Garthan jerked his chin in the general direction of the massed crowds beyond, barely held in check by a Corps security cordon. "This could go wrong so quickly."

The Nova Corps had spread some cover news about a possible strmi outbreak, a notoriously virulent Kree respiratory illness, but the crowd was suspicious and restless, not a good combination. Una shot them a cool, assessing stare before returning her glance to the _Eine_.

"We couldn't take the risk of allowing a suspect ship to land unchallenged."

"As you say." Garthan kept his concerns to himself. Spot checks were routine enough, especially during a disease scare, but he still felt uneasy. How would the crew of the _Eine_ react to a change in routine?

As it turned out, the answer was: very badly.

One moment the harbour official was requesting access for a spot search and containment, and the next, the _Eine_ was firing up her thrusters, the boiling heat instantly killing the immediate ground crew clustered near the refugee ship. Garthan froze in horror as the Eine started to rise, but Una was already running along the walkway, briskly pinging port security.

Nova Corpsmen in their starblasters instantly closed in, demanding that the _Eine_ land _immediately_ or be fired on, but instead of activating its stardrive as Garthan expected, the refugee ship turned ponderously instead, barrelling _into_ the starport like a juggernaut. Its aft wing drove through a support rig like a knife through butter, and the walkway _moaned_ , starting to list alarmingly towards the ground.

Garthan started to run, darting for the narrow stairs, but up ahead, Una flattened herself against the wall as the _Eine_ roared past, scraping the arched ceiling of the starport with a scream of shearing metal. Una waited for it to pass, then ran after it, seemingly unafraid of the fragmenting walkway, and Garthan lost sight of her as he swung himself down the narrow stairs, his heart hammering within him as the entire structure creaked and groaned. 

He made it free even as it started to collapse, and ignored it, sprinting after the _Eine_ on foot even though he wasn't sure what he could do. Starblasters roared overhead, tractor beams darting out to try and arrest the _Eine's_ forward thrust, but the huge refugee ship dwarfed them, and it smashed through the wall dividing the landing bays with the spaceport terminal with frightening ease. Beyond, in the terminal, screams erupted, drowning out the general announcements instructing people to stay calm and evacuate in an orderly manner.

Una leaped off the walkway, the glow of the Nova Force surrounding her as she used her Centurion access to give herself gravimetric flight, darting past the starblasters like a slender fish, raising her left arm. A bubble of Nova Force started to surround the _Eine_ , and it actually started to slow, but even as more and more starblasters added their tractor beams to Una's strength, the _Eine's_ cargo bay main airlock began to open.

To Garthan's horror, people began to jump out. 

He thought them desperate refugees at first, driven mad by panic and fear, but then one of them started to _warp_ as he fell, skin bubbling and melting, and then the pour of... mass... through the airlock became only vaguely people-like, a pinkish mass of flesh dotted with vaguely Kree-like pieces here and there, a nightmare liquid that splashed down onto the terrified crowds below.

As Garthan stared at the carnage through the breach in the wall, numb, his wristfeed pinged. It was Peter. "Hey. You want a lift?" 

He turned. The _Milano_ was hovering behind him, the sound of its engines lost in the screams of the crowd. Garthan ran for the ship, but didn't bother to get in, using the Nova Force to jump himself up onto the starboard wing and attaching himself to the sleek metal. On the feed, Peter laughed, startled, and waved at him through the steelglass of the flight deck. "You're one crazy asshole." 

"What are _you_ doing here?"

"My star map's on that thing?"

Garthan opened his mouth, then he sighed. "Just get us closer." 

"Sure thing." Garthan could see Peter grin a feral little grin as he manoeuvred the sleek starship through the gap in the wall. 

Beneath them was pure pandemonium. 

The crowd had stampeded for the exit, crushing people in its wake, rushing out from the Terminal in a shrieking tide. Nova Corpsmen hung from walkways, Millennians and Corpsmen firing their blasters into the gelatinous puddle of flesh under the ship, Denarians shooting bolts of Nova Force from their hands. The puddle flinched and groaned, but ignored the damage, strands flicking out and pulling members from the crowd into it, like reeling in shoals of small fish.

It was already twice the size of the cube in the Razorbacks' hideout, and the stink was _intense_. 

Then Una clenched her hands into fists, with a sharp closing gesture, and the Nova Force coalesced on top of the starship even as the starblasters abruptly cancelled their tractor beams. The Centurion let out a high, snarling warcry, and brought her hands down in an abrupt motion, glowing bright with the Nova Force as the Worldmind funnelled its power into her, streaming in from Garthan, from the other Nova Corpsmen present, and Garthan held his breath, straightening up-

There was a creaking, moaning sound of metal under stress, then the _Eine's_ thrusters abruptly shut off, and Una brought the ship down directly onto the fleshy puddle with another ululating cry. The force of its impact was so great that the ship cracked like an egg, sundered from starboard to port, like a multilayered jigsaw puzzle falling apart. The roar of the impact itself made Garthan's ears ring, and he could see the whole Terminal tremble around him from the force of the shockwave. On the ground floor, the closest members of the crowd were knocked off their feet like little dolls.

"Holy _shit_ ," Peter breathed. "Note to self. Never make that lady angry." 

"It's not dead." Garthan stared at the fleshy... _thing_ from the very stuff of nightmares, watching its surface undulate and ripple.

"What do you mean it's not dead? Your friend just smacked a _ship_ into it!" 

" _Fire_. Fire on the ship!" Garthan instructed, pinging the Worldmind even as he spoke. Maybe the thing had to be burned to die. 

Peter didn't hesitate. He opened fire on the back of the ship, trying to judge where the fuel tanks were, and after a moment's hesitation, the starblasters did too, the points of impact rippling out over the ship's shields, somehow still miraculously active over the wreck. 

"I thought this thing wasn't meant to have shields!" Peter objected.

"Not on the scan it didn't!"

"How the hell is there _still_ shielding when the ship itself is broken?"

It was a fine time to discover how _much_ Kree shield tech had improved over the cycles, damn their hides! Garthan was readying a Force blast when a glossy tendril shot up from the wreck, straight at Una. It grasped her around the waist, and Garthan fired, severing the tendril, but another came, and another, and then, just as he was dreading, the Force shield around the Centurion flickered and went out. 

She screamed once as she was dragged into the mass below, and then the fleshy pool began to bubble, and it closed over her like a hungry maw. 

_High alert_ , Garthan pinged the code red on all Nova channels of communication, _Kryn Terminal, Code Alpha, all units respond!_

 _Negative, Denarian,_ came the first answer, and Garthan staggered for a moment as he received the pinged response: an image of an armed convoy of Kree, their holo disguises dropping as they approached, skin fading from pink to blue, attacking the _Core Precinct_. Another negative fed in, from another precinct, then another, and Garthan felt buffeted by it all, dizzy.

"Hey. Hey!" Peter's urgent query snapped him out of it. "What's wrong?"

"The Kree are attacking local precincts. _That's_ what the refugee ships were bringing in before. Not shipments of kraka. They were taking in weapons, and Kree shock troops!" All that time spent chasing up Qodesa leads and hideouts, wasted. The shock troops likely simply faded into the general population itself, when they had been looking for monsters from Knowhere. The weapons had slipped in under their noses in the pods, probably retrofitted with jammers. A spot check would have blown the game, but they didn't spot check refugee ships-

"Worry about that later," Peter said tightly, "Brain monster _first_." 

Just as he said that, other tendrils shot out, grasping the closest two starblasters and dragging them sharply down, smashing them against the ground. It would take more than that to hurt the pilot within, but the monster seemed to know that, trying to pry open the cockpit glass. 

"Hang on!" Peter somehow managed to turn the _Milano_ tightly, firing on the strands, and as the creature shrank back, Garthan pinged the two downed pilots. 

_Do not leave your starblasters. Repeat, do not leave-_ But it was too late. The Nova Corpsmen within had already ejected the cockpit glass, scrambling out in their terror. Even as Peter fired again on the tendrils, they were overwhelmed, pulled into the mass.

"Bastard," Peter breathed, his voice shaky and frightened, " _Bastard_."

"Keep firing on the fuel tanks," Garthan said tensely, and Peter swung the _Milano_ around again, only for a tendril to shoot out and grab the portside wing. 

" _Garthan!_ " Peter yelled, but Garthan was already hauling himself higher up along the starboard side of the ship for a better shot. The _Milano_ lurched as it pulled free, and he nearly lost his footing, firing to deter another strand.

"Don't get distracted!"

" _You_ try and fly _and_ aim while a giant brain monster tries to down your ship!" 

Garthan fired off another bolt, then, abruptly, his link to the Nova Force was gone. Suddenly without any purchase on the ship, he slipped heavily, grabbing wildly until he found the edge of the wing and flattened himself on the metal. He could dimly hear the cries of the other Corpsmen down below as their links to the Worldmind failed one by one, as the monster lashed out at the remaining starblasters, shattering one against a wall, trying to pick another downed one open. He saw a tendril lash out and encircle the starboard wing, the _Milano_ groaning as it started to pull them down, and Garthan kicked at it.

The tendril rippled, then it seemed to opt for grabbing Garthan instead, dragging him off the wing of the _Milano_ , out over into the air. 

" _Garthan!_ "

" _Keep firing on that ship!_ " Garthan snarled, as his suit closed itself up into its armoured mode, and he was dragged down right into the mass. There was an instant-

-psionic

-overload

like a breach, swallowing him, the way Una had been eaten, the way Denarian Suni and Millennian Raga had been eaten, and now Garthan _understood_ the full immensity of the fragment of a dead Celestial's brain. It was not truly a weapon. It did not seek destruction: destruction was but a byproduct. It sought to _transcend_ -

for once its sire-mind had been larger than moons, greater than planets, and it had dreamed the vast dreams of the first of the children, listened to the songs of the stars- 

here was a mind that spanned three worlds, and it would eat its nodes and it would learn, more and more, until it could dream again of the stars-

 _NO_ , Garthan thought, as loudly and as wildly as he could, and he felt the _presence_ all around him flinch, recoil, felt it examine him, like a child examining an insect, and for a moment it felt as though he was being unravelled, like all the cycles of his life were being pinned under a scope, and he screamed into his visor-

Then the mind-thing was gone, and it felt like he was floating, tumbling, and Garthan tried to flail his arms but it felt like he was sunk in some impossibly dense liquid. He twisted, panicking, but that lasted only a moment, as a white-hot heat seared through and around him, causing his suit to go into protective lockdown, and he was thrown rolling across the floor of the Terminal, slamming into one of the starblaster wrecks with enough force to ping alarm systems from his suit.

Blindly, he managed to stagger up, staring at the burning wreck of the _Eine_ , of the sloughing creature as the last of it writhed and shrieked and died. The Worldmind's presence returned instantly, and Garthan waded into the dying matter, trying to find survivors, trying to find the others-

Suni was dead, partly dissolved, her face mostly melted. The only thing left of Raga was his suit, and a mass of graying flesh. He found Una closer to the wreck, her arms and legs all melted matter, but she managed a faint, if severe smile as he knelt down beside her. 

_You'll be fine_ , Garthan told her, in dismay. _The med techs are on their way and-_ Una shook her head, very gently, opened and closed her mouth once, and went still. Head bowed, Garthan listened to the whisper of her passing, then he pushed himself to his feet.

"Hey," Peter said softly, from his wristfeed. "Are you okay?"

Garthan watched as the glow of the Centurion rank on Una's chestplate went dim. "I'm fine." Garthan looked out towards Kryn, and clenched his fists. "Give me a lift to the Core precinct. My work isn't done yet."

III.

With the Worldmind back online, the Kree shocktroopers fought a losing battle, especially when the enraged local population armed itself and joined in, bolstering the embattled Nova Corps ranks. Still, the battle raged on over key precincts planetwide, especially in the precincts where the Kree had overwhelmed the precincts and dug in.

There was still a great deal of work to do. But Peter was growing restless now, wilder: the wolf within him had earned its teeth and claws, and Kryn was too small for him. And as such, Garthan spent what time he could with Peter, and what time he could not worrying that Peter would up and leave without a note or a trace. In all the years of his life, Garthan had never understood addiction until now.

They sat on the _Milano's_ wing one late afternoon, as the starship sat on cruising altitude close to the spaceport. The sun was going down, in elegant grades of orange and purple over the Kryn skyline, knees pressed flush, feet dangling over the drop. Peter's gaze kept jumping higher, towards the vastness of the sky.

"Three more precincts to go?" Peter asked, shifting to lie on his back on the wing. "That's pretty quick. You guys aren't doing too badly." 

Garthan nodded. He had the suspicion that Peter was waiting for that: for Kryn to return fully to Nova Corps control. For a moment, he wanted to offer some sort of excuse, say _something_ , anything that would give Peter an excuse to stay longer, but in the end, he reached into the pouch beside his empty hip holster and tossed a metal sphere to Peter. 

Peter caught it reflexively, his expression puzzled for a moment, then joyous, then wary. "Is this...?"

"It's the only star map recovered from that wreck, so I hope so," Garthan said, his tone carefully neutral. 

Peter turned the star map in his hands, deftly checking the engravings, then rubbing over the pressure points, and he smiled, slow and sweet and lovely. "Yeah! This is it. You're _awesome_."

"A deal's a deal," Garthan said, looking down over the city. He couldn't look at Peter a moment longer: all of a sudden, it just hurt too much. 

"Hey," Peter said softly, and an arm curled around Garthan's waist, Peter's chin pushing over his shoulder plate. "It's been fun."

"Really?" 

Peter let out a low, soft laugh. "Okay, maybe not the times you were being chewed on by an evil brain cube monster. But the rest of it, yeah. It's been fun." 

There was a finality to Peter's tone, a weighted edge, the wolf within Peter already straining to leap. Garthan let out a harsh breath, and clasped his hands over his knees. "You could always stay a little longer. See Ysaros. Or the eastern seaboard of Xandar. See the astrawhales." 

"Actually, I figured that you could probably borrow a starblaster and get back to Xandar on your own," Peter said, with deliberate calmness. "Or hitch a ride on some civvie freight. Right?"

Garthan let the question hang in the air long enough for it to become uncomfortable. "I could." 

Peter's laugh was soft and rueful. "You're too damned honest." His arms curled tight over Garthan's belly. "Want your gun back?"

"Keep it." Whether by mistake or intent, it seemed as though Garthan's rank was now permanent. He'd given up correcting the way others addressed him, and had been growing used to Denarian access. Sometimes he wondered if the Worldmind simply had far more problems to address than correcting one Corpsman's ranking, or if it meant something more. He didn't really care. Not with Peter here, warm and close.

"It's better like this," Peter said quietly. "You know that, right? Seriously. You don't really know me. Right?"

"I know enough," Garthan replied, refusing to turn. "Enough to want to learn more. To give things a fighting chance. It won't be perfect-"

"Stop saying that," Peter cut in sharply. "I thought you _understood_. I thought you knew. I was never going to stay. I'm sorry. This is never gonna be enough for me. Not yet."

"I know that too." 

"Then?"

"This isn't a rational thing."

Peter let out a low and strangled sound that built into a keening, frustrated snarl, then he jerked away, scrambling to his feet. "Look up at me. Now, damn you!" 

Garthan looked. The day had darkened quickly, and behind Peter the sky burned an intense purple with the last shades of the Xandarian sun, painted against the carefully terraformed climate, the temperature already starting to drop. There was nothing tame in the fierceness of Peter's face, his feet set apart like a fighter, his fingers curled at his sides, so beautiful that Garthan's heart ached. 

"You've got to let me go," Peter said, in his voice the snap and snarl of the howling wolf, the wanderlust, the ruthlessness. 

"I know."

"It's the only way."

"I don't believe that."

Peter's expression twisted for a moment, then he stalked angrily over to the flight deck, footsteps heavy from the grav boots, the steelglass sliding back at a gesture. He paused before climbing in, turning back, one hand curled tight in the edge of the cockpit. "This doesn't have to be so hard. If you want to fuck me before I go-"

"Peter." Garthan got to his feet, using the Nova Force to anchor him against the wind. Peter stiffened as he got close, then tensed up further as Garthan pressed against him, bracketing him against the hull of the ship with his arms. "I _don't_ want to 'fuck' you before anything. You're still young. Give this a chance. I want to know more about you. I'll like you to know more about me. I want to _make_ love to you. To wake up every morning with you beside me. Or watch you go knowing that you'll only come back to me." He kissed Peter's forehead, as Peter trembled against him, their breaths shaky and shallow. "I don't want you to have to live in a world where there's no one you can trust but yourself." 

Peter's eyes squeezed tight, all long, shaky gasps, and even as Garthan allowed himself to start to hope, Peter whispered, "Get off me." 

Garthan stepped back, holding his hands palms up, in the near-universal gesture of non-aggression, and Peter stared at him, his expression tight, his mouth set into a thin line.

"Sorry," Peter said finally, and seemed to want to say more, but then he shook his head, and pulled himself up into the flight deck, closing the glass over his head as he went. The Nova Force kept Garthan from falling off as the _Milano_ dipped, dropping until it was a safe distance to jump from the landing pad, but still Garthan hesitated, walking over to tap the steelglass shield. When Peter didn't look up, steadfastly staring at the controls, Garthan exhaled, splayed his palm briefly on the glass, and jumped off. 

Peter waited until Garthan got clear before lifting up and away from the spaceport, until he was a shadow against the star-dotted dome of the sky, then the _Milano's _stardrive turned it into a streak of light, spearing up towards the stars.__


	13. Chapter 13

epilogue - Peter.

Peter _hated_ injections. Gamora rolled her eyes as he slumped into the plastic chair beside her in the private waiting room of the Xandarian hospital with a hangdog expression.

"You survived an Infinity Stone, Peter. Suck it up."

"I don't like needles, okay?" Peter complained, but Gamora ignored him, electing instead to listen to a newscast. 

"Yeah? If you don't like needles, imagine how _I_ feel," Rocket growled, squirming on the seat beside him. A small little pot of soil with a stick sat on the next seat, and Peter steadfastly tried not to look at it. It seemed crazy that they had lost Groot, and Rocket clearly wasn't handling it in a remotely sane manner, but Peter was okay with that. Whatever worked. Or didn't. 

"Sorry." Peter offered, and Rocket's ears flicked a little.

"Don't mention it." Rocket frowned at the waiting room door. "How long do we have to be here? I don't like hospitals. We're obviously OK. No obvious wounds, just some bruises, maybe some mild concussions. Why the fucking bioscans and needles?"

"I know, right?" Peter warmed to his topic. It was Drax's turn right now, the big blue guy looking somewhat nonplussed at being the recipient of expert medical attention when he had been led away. Apparently it was a novelty for Drax. "Seriously. We should just get out of here. Fuck the system."

"Or we _would_ ," Rocket said dryly, "If _someone_ hadn't smashed our _ride_ into a _ship._ "

"Aww, come _on_ ," Peter complained. "It was necessary, ok?"

"It wasn't in the plan!"

"The plan was to get _into_ the ship!" 

Rocket rolled his eyes. "There are less _destructive_ ways of getting into the ship."

" _You_ crashed a ship into the Dark Aster too!"

" _I_ didn't realize that you totalled _our_ ride!" 

"All right, that's enough," Gamora said flatly. "So we have no ship. We'll... work it out. Perhaps the Xandarians can lend us one. We saved their planet, after all."

"Maybe." Peter cheered up briefly, before he started to scowl again. "I was really attached to that ship."

"So I thought." Gamora said mildly.

"Oh, not _you_ too."

"It seemed," Gamora added, "That you were doing a fine job of keeping the ship in one piece until you spoke to that Denarian."

Peter stiffened. "Uh. What Denarian?"

"The one who drew up alongside the ship in a starblaster?"

"Nope! No recollection. Whatsoever. It's just one of the Nova Corps, right? One of a lot of them. Who all. Died." It hurt a lot less to say it, somehow. And it didn't blindside him this time.

"Saal," Rocket said soberly. "That was the Denarian's name. He was pretty boss."

"He was." Peter murmured, staring hard at his boots. "And it would've been the way he would've wanted to go. In the line of duty and all that. What?" he asked, irritated, when Gamora tilted her head. 

"You're hiding something, Peter."

"Am I? What?" 

"You know this Denarian?"

"Did I say that?"

Rocket snorted. "He's probably been arrested by all of them on various charges here and there." 

"I'm going for a walk," Peter decided, getting up from his chair and stalking towards the door. 

"What? What did I say?" Rocket asked, sounding puzzled.

The disinfectant scent of the corridor calmed Peter down a fraction, and he chose a random direction and started walking, hands shoved in the pockets of his coat. Xandar was an old chapter in his life, one that he wasn't too proud of, and he didn't want to revisit any of it. Besides. He had a different life now, and a new family. In a way. Still.

"I'm such an asshole," Peter muttered to himself, then he flinched as he heard a throat being pointedly cleared behind him. It was Rhomann, looking mildly surprised. "Uh. Hi. Rhomann. How's things?"

"Chaotic, but working out." Rhomann said absently, studying Peter's face thoughtfully. 

"What? Something on my face?"

"Are you aware that you were listed as the next-of-kin for one of the Nova Corps?"

Peter blinked, absolutely puzzled. "Uh. Are there any Earthers in the Nova Corps?"

"No."

Okay. Next worst scenario. "Half... Earthers?" 

This time, Rhomann actually smiled a faint, quick smile. "Not a half-Earther either. Do you know Denarian Garthan Saal?"

Peter felt his stomach drop all the way to his boots. "He's... why would he..." Peter swallowed hard. He was _not_ going to have a meltdown in a Nova Corps hospital. He'd never live that down. "Uh, you need me to identify the... or... sign out his stuff, or..." 

Rhomann's eyebrows rose. "Denarian Saal is alive. But barely. He's in critical condition. The pressure..." Rhomann hesitated.

"The pressure what?" 

"Crushed most of his vital organs. If not for the Nova Force and his plate armour, he would be dead. It's a miracle he's still alive."

"Well," Peter said angrily, before he could stop himself, "God knows the Worldmind fucking _owes_ him." At Rhomann's startled blink, Peter added, in a calmer tone. "So what do you want from me?"

"Authorisation to try a few experimental bioengineering advancements," Rhomann said uncomfortably. "There's a failure rate of-"

"Just do whatever you need to make him better," Peter cut in, and Rhomann nodded, selecting something on his wristfeed as he turned away. "Wait. Can I see him?" 

"He's not conscious."

"I don't care."

Rhomann hesitated for a longer moment. "It's not pretty."

Peter had been steeling himself for the worst, but as it turned out, all he could see through the medical obs window was a heavily bandaged head, sticking out of some sort of chrome cocoon. It looked really uncomfortably like a coffin missing the part on the top, and Peter had to look away quickly, jerking to the side as Rhomann reached over to pat him on the shoulder, walking, then running through the hospital, blindly trying to find the way out. 

Gamora found him balanced high on the safety rail of the carefully trimmed hospital gardens, staring out at the still-smoking ruin that the Dark Aster cut against the sleek white contours of the city of Xandar, and climbed up to sit beside him, following his blank gaze. 

"Denarian Dey talked to us."

Peter nodded slowly. 

"Family?"

"No." 

"Friend?"

"Someone from the past," Peter said tightly, and Gamora nodded again. 

"I always wondered where you got that Nova Corps blaster. In your ship's cargo armoury," Gamora elaborated, when Peter glanced at her. 

"Guess what." Peter blew out a sigh. "I'm the biggest asshole whom I know."

"There's... Ronan."

"Ronan's dead. Nice try."

"There's... Thanos." 

"Thanos is insane. There's an insanity defence. We should still kick his ass, but he's too batshit crazy to be a real asshole. Stop trying to make me feel better."

"There's... Yondu."

"True," Peter admittedly. "But not even close." He kicked his heels briefly against the silvery rail. "Once upon a time, I was a really stupid kid. I was so sure that I was always right. And I didn't really care whom I hurt. But by the time I got over myself and thought about going back, or calling in to apologise or something, it just felt too hard, you know? Or too dumb. Or not enough. Seemed better to just let it slide."

Gamora nodded slowly. "So what next?"

"I guess we find a way off this rock. I'll talk to Nova Prime."

"You're still a stupid child, then," Gamora noted. When Peter glared at her, she added, dryly. "You can't run away from everything, Peter. You faced down Ronan the Accuser with nothing but courage and a stupid dance. You can do this. Right an old wrong."

"It wasn't a stupid dance," Peter muttered mulishly. "And I don't think that I was in the wrong." Under Gamora's stare, he added, "Okay. Maybe. A little. Things could have been handled better. Okay?"

"That's the first step to solving a problem," Gamora said encouragingly. "Recognising that you have one." 

"Okay." Peter exhaled loudly. "Okay. I can do that." 

"So who is he?" Gamora asked gently.

"Someone..." Peter began, then he shook his head slowly. "Someone who loved me. A long time ago."

x

Xandarian reconstruction surgery was surprisingly good. The process was also surprisingly gruesome. Peter spent the first couple of weeks in a near constant state of queasiness, at least until the skin grafts started and the biosynth flesh and bone filled out. The organs were a harder sell to Garthan's immune system: all synthetic, speed-grown from Garthan's own DNA and fitted with stabilising implants. In three weeks, Peter had learned almost everything he had never wanted to know about Xandarian biology and its finicky tendency to react catastrophically and randomly to invasive implant tech.

He had almost expected the other guardians to chafe at the delay, but he found them philosophical, instead. Rocket spent a lot of time in the top-level Xandarian gardens, with Groot's pot. Apparently he and Groot, like many bounty hunters, maintained a room in a small low rent housing project on sublevel five. Drax seemed content to train, or sit about the gardens with Rocket.

As to Gamora, she spent most of her time researching the Worldmind's records on Thanos. "It's good to have some downtime," she told Peter, when he reluctantly broached the subject once over dinner. The others had simply looked mildly surprised that he had even said anything, and Peter dropped it. 

He had thought that he would get bored, stranded planetside with nothing to do, but Peter was wrong there, too. Time seemed to flow faster than it should. He tried to help Gamora with the research, did some light reading on possible (low trouble) scores, and dozed off in the stretches between, half-sprawled on the hospital cot, waiting for Garthan to win his latest battle for survival. 

And so it was that when Garthan finally woke up out of his induced coma and pressed a shaky hand lightly on the back of Peter's neck, Peter might have screamed. A little. Not in a girly way. While lurching blindly out of sleep and falling out of his chair and onto the floor. 

Garthan's eyes were unfocused when Peter crawled back up, mildly bruised, but he still seemed amused as he blinked slowly at Peter, watching as Peter settled awkwardly into the chair.

"Hey." Peter said softly. 

"Peter?" Garthan's voice was a hoarse whisper. He frowned as his hand slipped on the bed, but after a shaky try, Peter grabbed Garthan's wrist awkwardly, folding Garthan's palm between his own. 

"Um. You're not dead. And. You're in hospital. And yeah, you're kinda really messed up." 

Garthan started to laugh, then he coughed instead, as though it hurt to laugh, then frowned a little and closed his eyes. "I missed you," he said, sounding a little confused. 

Peter's eyes stung a little. "Sorry. Um. You shouldn't have listed me as next-of-kin, by the way. I probably okayed every possible legal and semilegal drug in your system right now. Maybe worse."

Garthan squeezed his hand lightly. "M'sorry."

"You? Sorry? About what?"

"Pushed... too hard. Blamed you. When you left. Told Rhomann that you were... an asshole." 

"Well," Peter said, with a startled laugh. "Don't worry about it, man. I deserved all of that." 

"Told... Nova Prime. Not to trust you."

"Yeah. Don't worry about it. You had every right."

"Didn't say... I didn't," A ghost of a smile pulled at Garthan's mouth. "But it was. Unprofessional."

"Only you would get almost killed, then lie on a hospital bed and worry about being _unprofessional_ ," Peter said, and he tried to laugh but end up making a choking sound instead that he swallowed hurriedly when Garthan started to frown. 

"Need... to sleep. Will you. Still be here?" 

"Yeah." Peter was choking up again. "I'll be here."

He pressed Garthan's hand back on the bed, then rubbed his eyes roughly, angrily, as Garthan's breathing evened out, and blew out a long sigh.

"A long time ago, hm?" Gamora asked from the doorway, her voice soft. Peter turned sharply, his eyes narrowed, but Gamora seemed wistful instead. Preoccupied. 

"What?"

"How did you even meet a Corpsman? Unofficially?"

"Without getting arrested, you mean?" Peter asked dryly. "It was a long time ago, like I said. I was looking for the star map. The one that eventually led me to the Infinity Stone. It was a messy business."

"Ah." Gamora looked solemn. "The Kree incursion. On Kryn?"

"What. How did you know? I thought it didn't become public news-"

"Thanos," Gamora said succinctly. "He has a love of First Races artefacts. He was... looking for something. Hints to the locations of the Infinity Stones, I believe. The Kree paid him in shiploads of the artefacts, wherever they could find them. Wiped out the market for over a cycle, I hear."

"So _that's_ it." Peter blinked. "I always wondered about that part of the business. So _Thanos_ was behind the brain cube creepy drug?"

"With his Black Order, yes. I only heard pieces of it. I was in Sanctuary then. Training." Gamora's lips thinned. "Thanos was obsessed. He even murdered a family of First Races artefact museum curators. They were Luphomoids. He stole their daughter."

"Nebula?"

Gamora nodded. "She cried for weeks. But they too had a star map. An almost identical copy of yours, I believe. Though it was coincidence that you reached Morag around the same time as Korath."

"Yeah." Peter stared at Garthan's sunken frame. "Crazy assholes." 

There was a long silence, filled by the humming whirs of the machines in the room, their cables and drips snaked under the gray blanket, and Peter picked up Garthan's limp palm again, turning it up. Unlike human hands, there were no life lines, all strange, unbroken skin, marred only with calluses. 

"Found a ship yet?" Peter asked, half dreading the answer. 

"No." 

"How long will that take?"

"As long as you need," Gamora suggested, and smiled when Peter glanced up at her. "But I heard that Denarian Dey was working on some sort of surprise present. It's all secret right now."

"That's... cool? I guess?" Peter hoped it wasn't a medal. He wasn't really sure about medals. But before he could ask, Gamora nodded, and slipped away, and the question died unsaid. "That's one of my new friends," he told the sleeping Xandarian instead, softly. "I'm not sure if you would'a liked her."

x

By the time Garthan was well enough to be able to sit up in bed, he had met all of the rest of Peter's new group of semi-psychotic friends, even the - of all the crazy things - tiny little Groot plant in the pot. Strangely enough, Garthan seemed to already be friends (?) with Rocket. Gamora passed muster, with not even a blink, and even Drax didn't even incite a comment, even when Drax asked Garthan about the concept of sufficient provocation. It was weird.

"What's weird?" Garthan asked, when Peter told him this. They were sitting in the hospital gardens, the still partly-paralyzed Garthan on a floater seat, Peter cross-legged on a bench. They were watching sundown again, and it felt like the last time was only yesterday, when Peter had been young and stupid and hungry to see the universe. 

"You talked to my friends and nothing exploded."

Garthan shot him an amused glance. "You don't need my approval on that front. They're a collection of savagery and trouble waiting to happen. To someone else."

"Don't you mean that I can't _get_ your approval on that front?"

"I think they've amply proven that... troubled as they are, they'll watch your back," Garthan said, more soberly. "They'll die for you and they won't sell you out. I think that you can trust them. If they're the family that you've chosen, you're lucky."

"Oh." Peter was thrown for a moment before he recovered. "We're going to get a ship," he blurted out, finally. "Another one. Um. Gamora hasn't been around the block, not out of her own will, and Drax too. I was thinking, maybe we'll check out some of the ringworlds near Astraval." 

"Peter." Garthan reached over to squeeze his palm. "What happened to me is not your fault." 

"I know that-"

"So go and get a ship. You won't be happy planetside."

Peter stared at Garthan in surprise, then an uncomfortable thought wormed to the surface. "You don't want me to be here?"

Garthan didn't answer, staring blankly over at the view of the cityscape instead. Finally, he murmured, "It's good to see you again. But it's also painful beyond belief." Garthan pulled his hand away, folding it in his lap. 

Stung, Peter unfolded his legs. "I guess I should have figured that part out. Sorry. I'll go." 

"I want you to stay," Garthan said, sounding a little confused, and when Peter frowned at him, Garthan added, with an uneven smile, "You never did visit."

"Yeah." 'Sorry' seemed an inadequate thing to say. 

"Were you happy? Out there?"

"Yeah." Peter said uncomfortably. "I still have a lot of the 'verse to see. Sorry."

"That's good," Garthan said, with something like relief. "I hoped that you would be." 

"Really?" Peter asked, unable to help himself. "I thought you'd rather that it sucked, and I came back." 

Garthan shot him a puzzled look. "Why wouldn't I want you to be happy?"

"Even out there? Away from Xandar?"

"Of course."

"I think," Peter said, with a rueful smile, "That you're kinda utterly wasted on me, Denarian. Should'a found a nice Krylorian wife, like Rhomann, and settled down and had a lot of cute half-Krylorian babies." 

"I don't think so," Garthan said, with a little frown, then he inhaled sharply as Peter leaned over precariously to kiss him on the cheek. "Peter." 

"I'll come back this time," Peter promised. "Really. When you've got fewer drugs in your system and if you still want to give this a shot." When Garthan merely stared at him, Peter added. "Okay. I'm kinda sensing disbelief here."

"Really. Whatever gives you that impression?"

"I'm sorry about before, okay? You're right. I'm an asshole. I was also a really dumb kid. Still am, in many ways. But I promise you, this time I will really try. To be. Less of an asshole." Peter frowned. "This isn't really coming out right."

"Not particularly," Garthan noted, though he smiled faintly. 

"Here." Peter took the walkman from within his coat, along with the headphones, and put them on Garthan's lap. "That's my promise. That I'll try. That I'll come back." 

"What is it?" Garthan turned the walkman over in his hands, and Peter reached over, fitting the headphones gently over Garthan's ears after a few adjustments.

"It was from my mom." Peter pressed the 'play' button, and Garthan blinked. Peter could hear the first, faint, lazy chords of _Come and Get Your Love_ start up, and he grinned as Garthan looked more closely at the walkman, studying it, running an index finger over the dints and scratches. "Yeah, it's an old thing, from Earth. It's my treasure. My promise."

Garthan pulled off the headphones, very carefully. "I can't take this."

"Sure you can. I heard that physio's going to be real boring. So this will keep you going. It works for me. Don't argue, OK?" Peter added hastily, when Garthan opened his mouth again. "I'm not giving it to you. You're just holding it for me. And I'm going to be really pissed off if you lose it, just saying." 

"... All right." Peter's wrist feed chose this moment to ping him, and Garthan added mildly, "Rhomann wants to tell you something."

"Pretty sure he can wait."

"Not for this," Garthan said, a little cryptically, and Peter stared for a moment.

" _No._ Really?"

"Try to act surprised." 

"Well then," Peter said, a little helplessly. "I guess I'll go get the others. Um." 

"Go." 

"I could stay a few more days-"

"What for?" Garthan asked, his smile wry. "You won't be happy, knowing that there's a ship ready for you right there. That you don't have to be planetside. Go and see the ringworlds. Send me a 'postcard'." 

"Seriously," Peter said softly, leaning closer. "Maybe you should rethink your stance on half-Krylorian babies." 

Garthan shook his head slowly and reached out, tugging Peter close, and their first real kiss in over a decade felt more like the world coming into sync, like reaching land after years adrift, like a promise rather than goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks everyone for reading! :D 
> 
> tumblr: manic-intent  
> twitter: manic_intent


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